Christian women must be wise and not ‘weak-willed,’ CBMW council member Mary Kassian recently told more than 200 attendees of the Women’s Leadership Consultation Feb. 10-12 at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS).

Drawing on 2 Tim 3:6-7, Kassian unpacked five weaknesses which often beset women, pointing out that the antidote is being a woman who is wise according to holy Scripture.

A noted author, theologian, and speaker, Kassian has written a number of books on women’s issues and biblical gender roles including The Feminist Gospel: The Movement to Unite Feminism with the Church and Women, Creation, and the Fall.

The Women’s Leadership Consultation is an annual event that alternates among the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention. It seeks to equip women for greater service in the ministry of the local church. The conference began in 1990 at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. It was last held at SBTS in 1999 and will move to Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City next year.

The first weakness that often entraps a weak-willed woman is allowing access to worldly thoughts, ideas, philosophies, or people that have a corrosive affect on their lives.

Like the serpent in Eden, Kassian pointed out that evil seeks to slither into the lives of women in a number of ways. A Christian woman must watch vigilantly for those influences and keep them out, she said.

"[The apostle] Paul says a woman is [to be] alert, watchful," Kassian said. "A wise woman stands guard and watches those access points in her life and keeps them closed off.

"A wise woman doesn’t allow ungodliness into her home. A wise woman stands guard and takes care to make sure that there aren’t those access points. Maybe it is exposure in terms of what’s coming into her home [through] movies or magazines or the Internet. Evil wants to worm its way in. A wise woman must keep it out."

A second characteristic Kassian said typifies a weak-willed woman is vulnerability to ungodly emotional, relational, and spiritual influences.

Such a woman must replace things that threaten to exert a diabolical influence over her with those that will spur her toward godliness, she said.

"If you don’t start dealing with that negative influence and bring a positive influence into your life, a godly influence, then it is going to chip away long enough and it is going to do really significant damage," Kassian said. "A wise woman understands that."

A third attribute of weak-willed women is a propensity to carry baggage of guilt, shame, anger, and despair that weighs them down spiritually and emotionally. A wise woman realizes that God must deal with her baggage, Kassian said.

"We are just packed down and overwhelmed with so much baggage and the Lord says to women in this passage (2 Tim. 3:6-7) that, to be wise, you’ve got to start dealing with that baggage," she said.

"Weak-willed women have lots of baggage and a wise woman takes it before the Lord and starts dealing with it."

The fourth weakness that confronts such women is that they are easily swayed by evil desires. To women, Kassian said, worldly affections are like the Sirens of Greek mythology--women are often drawn irresistibly by the seemingly beautiful music of the world’s notions of beauty, power, and romantic relationships.

Once a woman becomes entranced by the world’s harmonies, her affections become misplaced, Kassian said. The wise woman finds genuine beauty, power and relational fulfillment by looking away from the world and locking her gaze upon the supreme perfections found in Christ alone, she said.

"Most of our problem with sin is the problem with desire, the problem with the heart," she said.

"The way that you are going to be able to deal with sin in your life is by replacing what you see as the beauty of sin…with a greater beauty and that is the beauty of Christ. We are drawn toward beauty as women. We are drawn toward that sweet song, and Jesus wants us to be drawn towards Him and to listen to His Holy Spirit."

Finally, Kassian said weak-willed women don’t often follow through on what they know to be right and true. These women are weak in their convictions, she said. To be a wise women, one must pray that God will apply the truths of Scripture to their hearts in such a way that both their minds and emotions are transformed to walk in lock-step with the wisdom of God.

"Wise women allow the truth of God to change them," Kassian said. "They are able to grab hold of it (Scripture) and say ‘I don’t totally understand it, but Jesus use it to change my heart and to change my life. I want to be different tomorrow than I am today. Change me. Help me apply this truth to my life.’ That’s what a woman of wisdom does."

More than 200 women came to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) from nine states and Canada recently for a conference designed to train female leaders for ministry in the local church.

An annual event that alternates each year between the six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Women’s Leadership Consultation drew women from as far away as Canada during its first visit to Southern since 1999.

Heather King, director of women’s programs at Southern Seminary and a council member of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), said the number of attendees at the Feb. 10-12 conference demonstrates a hunger among evangelical women for in-depth training for the task of ministry.

"The responses I heard confirmed our theory that women, even if not called to be full-time seminary students, desire to be equipped and as effective in their ministries as possible," King said.

"Women’s ministry leaders want to be challenged and desire training that will impact their ministries not [only] for the coming year, but for years to come. A common response I heard was that SBTS has set a new standard in women’s ministry training."

Among the speakers were two teachers known across the evangelical world for challenging women to think biblically on such vital issues as their God-ordained roles in the church and home. Mary Kassian and Dorothy Patterson, both authors of books on biblical womanhood and both CBMW council members, led the conference’s three plenary sessions.

Kassian used 2 Tim. 3 to encourage women to be wise--and not `weak-willed’--women of the Word, and Patterson taught from Esther, encouraging women to develop leadership styles that glorify God.

Kassian is author of a number of books including The Feminist Gospel: The Movement to Unite Feminism With the Church and Women, Creation and the Fall. Patterson has also written several works including Where’s Mom? The High Calling of Wives and Mothers and The Family: Unchanging Principles for Changing Times.

King said the event’s planners isolated several issues around which it built conference sessions.

"We began to ask ourselves, ‘What are the key issues that leaders must understand, even if they are unaware of the importance of such issues?’" King said. "The list was long, but we narrowed it to four key issues that a women’s ministry leader must understand."

The four key issues were:

The four central issues were used as a springboard for equipping women’s ministry leaders in the local church. Chief among the aims was to teach women how to reach and minister to other women with the gospel.

Mary Mohler, director of the Seminary Wives Institute (SWI) at Southern Seminary, said the conference is crucial in equipping equippers.

"That factor alone makes it very unusual as far as women’s conferences go," Mohler said. "We purposefully planned a full program of speakers who confronted today’s issues of leadership head on and in a most effective way. The results of such training were evident immediately.

"Women ordered recordings of what they heard in record numbers. Their feedback to me personally indicated their gratitude for the opportunity to be encouraged but at the same time challenged to not only press on but to aim higher in their pursuit to be wise women who are guided by the Word of God.

"Others told me that this conference simply set a new standard for excellence in leadership training for women. Given the gifted speakers on the program, we expected nothing less and give God glory for the pleasing results."

Participants said they were both encouraged and challenged by conference speakers. Tina Tindle of Whitesburg Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala., said the conference was for her a weekend of spiritual refreshing.

"Our speakers this week are teaching us about being a wise woman, and they’re doing that scripturally," Windle said. "That refreshes our memories [and] it refreshes our hearts. Then we can go and relate it to the women that we are ministering to."

Lorie Looney, a master of divinity student at Southern Seminary from Tallassee, Ala., said the ‘counter-cultural’ nature of conference teaching enabled her to see contemporary issues more clearly in light of Scripture.

"We, as women today, are reflecting Christ and His commands in the culture," she said. "It’s sort of like we’re getting a chance to counter-attack the culture if we correctly understand and define God’s Word."

Not long after her 29th birthday, Carolyn McCulley looked out at her world and found the beady eyes of an identity crisis staring back.

McCulley was approaching at mock speed that time in life when the first age digit flips from "2" to "3" with all the giddiness of an LED alarm clock burning forth 5:59 when wakeup time is 6:00 a.m.

She was confused, depressed, and still single. Worse, feminism as a worldview told her that the male species was the true enemy, that all this confusion was the product of a male-dominated society peddled at the inflated price of female advancement. Feminism’s two-fisted tenets offered McCulley comfort on par with Job’s friends.

Soon after turning 30, McCulley met one man whose message shot holes in her feminism like a gatling gun gone mad. McCulley traveled to visit her sister in South Africa where she heard an American pastor, C.J. Mahaney, preach the Gospel at a church in Cape Town.

God’s sovereign grace effectually attended Mahaney’s preaching that evening and McCulley was drawn out of the imprisoning darkness of feminism and into the liberating light of Jesus Christ. (McCulley’s full testimony is available on the website of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood; please see http://www.cbmw.org/resources/articles/mcculley.php).

"He (Mahaney) was so passionate for Jesus and so very real," she said. "His relationship with Christ appealed to me."

McCulley joined a local church and began to have her views of manhood and womanhood transformed by holy Scripture and the marriages of the devoted believers who now surrounded her.

"As I studied the Bible, I also studied the marriages of my new friends eager to see what this Christian concept of benevolent masculine leadership and joyful feminine submission actually looked like in real life," McCulley said.

"Though not perfect, what I saw was attractive. I saw men who sacrificed their own preferences and pleasures to make sure their wives and children were cultivated spiritually. These were men who took their responsibilities to be servant leaders seriously.

"They did not see marriage as a trap or children as an impediment to the pursuit of their own leisure and weekend hobbies. Instead, their families were seen as gifts worthy of their hard work."

Today, several years later, McCulley’s world has been transformed from that which she once viewed with such trepidation. A journalism major in college, she regularly writes for many Christian and mainstream publications on the topics of biblical femininity and a biblical view of singleness.

McCulley serves as media and marketing specialist for Sovereign Grace Ministries, a church-planting and publishing ministry for which Mahaney serves as president. Late last year, Crossway published her first book, Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? Trusting God With a Hope Deferred.

The book seeks to answer biblically the question that many single women ask themselves after a certain period--did I kiss marriage goodbye? "Trusting God with a hope deferred," is the book’s major premise, McCulley explains.

"The first chapter introduces the experience of being single with, I trust, a lot of sympathy," she said. "The second and third chapters explore the gift of singleness and the quiet providence of God in how He works and why we can trust Him with our desires."

Over the second half of the book, McCulley seeks to chart a clear path of biblical femininity for single women that is sometimes overlooked by the broader evangelical culture because of a laudable focus on marriage.

"The roadmap for fruitful femininity is found in the Proverbs 31 epilogue," McCulley said. "Because this portrait of godly femininity is painted as an excellent wife, many single women just skim it or even skip it completely.

"But this epilogue was a Hebrew acrostic taught by a wise mother to her young son. In memorizing this acrostic, this future ruler learned both his Hebrew alphabet and the virtues of a woman who would make an excellent wife. In other words, these qualities should be evident in a single woman’s life long before she gets married or whether she ever gets married."

The seeds were sown for the book while McCulley assisted Carolyn Mahaney, wife of C.J. Mahaney, with her book Feminine Appeal: The Seven Virtues of a Godly Wife, also published by Crossway Books. At the urging of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) Executive Director Randy Stinson and with the encouragement of the Mahaneys, McCulley says she wrote the book.

"As I immersed myself in her (Carolyn Mahaney’s) teaching about biblical femininity, I realized that my own view of femininity as a single woman had been profoundly affected and I wanted to share those insights with other single women," she said.

McCulley says the book’s aim is to encourage single women of all ages that the Bible shows but a singular path of femininity, one that must be walked by Christian women both single and married.

The Word of God has given Christ-centered wisdom and direction to the still single McCulley where feminism only proffered empty, vain philosophies--the very ‘worldly wisdom’ which the cross of Christ confounds.

"There isn’t a separate, diverging path if you suspect you may be single for a long time or for the rest of your life," she said. "There’s no hybrid, third-wheel model of femininity for single women. In every season of our lives, we are all to pursue the biblical qualities of godly womanhood found in Proverbs 31, Titus 2, and other Scriptures."

McCulley’s book (and the above-mentioned book by Carolyn Mahaney) is available through the CBMW webstore: http://www.cbmw.org/store/.

            Would Gen Xers and ‘Next Geners’ better understand their American heritage if history books updated their language and called the men who gathered in at the first Constitutional Convention “our founding human beings” instead of “our founding fathers?”

            Or instead of entitling his 1970s hit “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” might the late country music legend Waylon Jennings have sold more records if he had used more inclusive lyrics like “Only Parent That’ll Walk the Line?”

            Translators of the full-Bible edition of Today’s New International Version (TNIV), released last week by Zondervan, have tampered in similar fashion with something infinitely more sacred, evangelical Bible scholar/theologian Wayne Grudem says.

By employing gender-neutral language, translators have edited the Scriptures in a manner that is both inaccurate and unnecessary, says Grudem, research professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary and co-author of The TNIV and the Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy (Broadman & Holman 2004).  Grudem is also a board member for The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and past president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

            “They are changing a historical document (the Bible),” Grudem said. “It is like someone writing about Bob Dylan’s song from the 1960s, ‘How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?’ and deciding that people today wouldn’t understand that Bob Dylan was using an example of a specific man to teach a general truth, and therefore telling modern 18-34 year olds that Bob Dylan wrote these words in a song: ‘How many roads must a human being walk down, before you call them a person?’ That would not be historically accurate, nor would it be necessary. But that is what the TNIV has done to the Bible.” 

            Zondervan released the TNIV earlier this month following perhaps the largest advertising campaign in church history. The publishing house pumped millions of dollars into a media blitz that saw it run ads in scores of publications both sacred and secular, including “Rolling Stone,” which ostensibly changed its policy to run the ad after initially rejecting it due to “religious content.”

            The TNIV is an updated version of Zondervan’s famous New International Version (NIV), for many years the best selling Bible translation, annually pulling in one-third of all Bible sales. The main difference between the TNIV and the NIV is that the new translation employs “inclusive language.” That is, many words referring to the male gender are nebulously changed to include the female gender—“they” instead of “he,” “parent” instead of “father,” “brothers and sisters” instead of “brothers,” and so on.

Zondervan is targeting the 18-34 age group with the new translation, a demographic that Paul Caminiti, vice president and publisher for Bibles for Zondervan, calls “the most spiritually-intrigued group on the planet.”

            “Our mission at Zondervan for our Bible group is simple: It is more people engaging the Bible more,” Caminiti said. “We have wrestled for some time with the idea that we might engage more people than ever before in God’s Word. And as we began to look carefully at that and as we began to study different people and their degrees of ripeness, in a sense, for spiritual truth, it became clear through our research that the most spiritually-intrigued group on the planet are 18 to 34 year olds.”

            Still, Grudem contends that a desire to reach a particular demographic group does not provide warrant to alter the Scriptures.

            “I think every 18-34 year old can understand the first grade reading words ‘man,’ ‘father,’ ‘son,’ ‘brother,’ and ‘he/him/his,’” Grudem said. “Do people really want a Bible where they can’t trust that what they are reading is what the Bible says?”

            Instead of using terms such as “gender-inclusive” and “gender-neutral” to describe the TNIV’s revised language, Zondervan’s ad blitz—using the slogan “Timeless truth. Today’s language.”— is billing the new translation as “gender accurate,” itself an inaccurate description, say both Grudem and Randy Stinson, executive director of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

            “This translation is by and large inaccurate when it comes to the gender-related language,” Stinson said. “While calling it gender-accurate might be a good marketing move, it cannot hide the fact that in literally thousands of places this Bible—in its use of words such as ‘son’, ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘his’, ‘brother’, ‘man’, and ‘father,’ are translated in ways not recognized in standard Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic dictionaries. The result is a loss of meaning throughout the Old and New Testaments.”

            Despite Zondervan’s noble intentions, Stinson fears that changing pronouns and inserting neutral gender references to suit contemporary whims will not compel large numbers of any age-particular group to desire the Scriptures but will only place an inaccurate translation in the hands of Christians.

            “While we are grateful for the desire to reach a particular age group, we are doubtful that the reason this age group does not read the Bible is because of masculine pronouns and the presence of words like father, brother, and son,” Stinson said. “It is possible to have good motives and still end up with a faulty product. This, in my estimation, is what has happened with the TNIV.”

            Despite clear examples of the use of inclusive language unwarranted by the manuscripts (See accompanying article at www.gender-news.com/article.php?id=61), Caminiti contends that the TNIV is an accurate translation, one he believes will eventually replace the NIV as the translation of choice among evangelicals.

            “This translation was done by the Committee for Bible Translators (CBT) which is the same committee that translated the NIV,” Caminiti said. “In our estimation, they are the most qualified group of translators on the planet. They come from the most renowned evangelical colleges and seminaries in the world…They are a who’s who of linguists and we would make a very clear distinction between someone who is a trained linguist and simply someone who has a theological degree.

            “Also, this is a completely independent committee. They are not owned by Zondervan. They are not owned by the International Bible Society. They are their own independent group and, believe me, they work independently to translate God’s Word in the most accurate way possible.” 

Mark Rice, vice president of corporate communications for Zondervan, insists that the TNIV meets the company’s most important criteria: widespread acceptance by its target demographic.

            “The one thing we have really kept in focus is, and what frankly has been the most encouraging, has been the response we’ve received from the age group that we are after. That is frankly, for us, the response that is most important—and that is how are 18 to 34 year olds responding to the text?” Rice said.

“Our biggest supporters have been young people in the 18 to 34 year old demographic who want a Bible that combines the best in biblical scholarship with language that is relevant today and we have received overwhelming support from that age group. To us that is the true sign of how this text is being received in the market.”

            The TNIV controversy has a shelf life that dates back nearly a decade.

            News of plans to revise the NIV in a gender-neutral direction first came to public notice in 1997 when WORLD magazine detailed the intentions of Zondervan and the International Bible Society (IBS)—the group responsible for the NIV—in a series of stories that led to a meeting in Colorado Springs between a number of evangelical leaders and Bible scholars and representatives from Zondervan and IBS.

            Participants in that meeting—which Focus on the Family founder James Dobson convened—reached an agreement that the NIV would not be revised as planned. Opponents of the revision, as well as Zondervan and IBS representatives signed a document called the “Colorado Springs Guidelines” (www.cbmw.org/resources/nivi/guidelines.php) that gave specific guidance as to how gender-related language in the Bible should be handled.

            However, in 1999, IBS effectively reneged on the agreement and announced plans for a new translation. In 2002, Zondervan rolled out the New Testament edition of the TNIV, which unleashed a hail of discussion over its fidelity—or lack thereof—to the original languages. 

            Citing an article that appeared in the organization’s publication “Light Magazine,” WORLD’s Gene Edward Veith recently reported that IBS President Peter Bradley said translators had to “withdraw” from the Colorado Springs Guidelines because they conflicted with guidelines of the Forum of Bible Agencies, to which the IBS subscribes. In the wake of the release of the TNIV New Testament, more than 100 evangelical leaders, including many Southern Baptists, signed onto a public statement stating that “the TNIV Bible is not sufficiently trustworthy.”

            In producing English Bibles, there are essentially two approaches to their translation: the “dynamic equivalence” or “formal equivalence” variety which seeks to render a passage according to its general sense; the second strategy is a “word-for-word” approach which translates words substantially using their literal English equivalent.

Dynamic equivalence translations include the NIV and variations of the Living Bible, among others. Word-for-word translations include the New American Standard Bible (NASB), English Standard Version (ESV), Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), New King James Version (NKJV) and the venerable KJV.

So where does this discussion leave the discriminating pew-sitter in the local church? Stinson urges believers to select translations that are most literally congruent to the ancient biblical languages.

            “Evangelicals should be encouraged to embrace translations that have adopted a word-for-word translation philosophy such as the ESV, NASB, NKJV, or HCSB, just to name a few,” he said. “People buying Bibles should have accuracy as their first concern. Even those in the 18-34 age group can understand the language in these translations.”

The TNIV is available on line at www.tniv.com. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood will be providing more extensive critiques of the TNIV at www.cbmw.org/resources/tniv/.

In an initial examination of the full-Bible edition of Today’s New International Version (TNIV) recently released by Zondervan, critics have already found attempts at "gender neutrality" that substantially change the meaning of passages in both the Old and New Testaments.

Bible scholar/theologian Wayne A. Grudem and Randy Stinson, executive director for The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) have provided preliminary analysis on the TNIV’s revisions of the original New International Version (NIV) and have provided a number of obvious areas in which gender-neutral language alters the meaning of a passage from the Hebrew and Greek. Grudem is research professor of the Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Ariz., and is a board member for CBMW and a past president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

A few examples of erroneous changes include (Alterations and words in the original language are in italics):

Grudem said it is proper to remove male-oriented words when there is no male-oriented meaning in the original Greek or Hebrew text, but said the above examples and many others his early analysis has yielded, point up the reason why fidelity to the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts is non-negotiable.

"When there is a male meaning, we dare not under-translate and conceal the meaning just because that emphasis is unpopular today," he said.

For further evalustions of TNIV texts, see the survey's by Grudem (http://www.cbmw.org/resources/tniv/articles_tniv/2005_0222_article_grudem.php) and Vern Poythress (www.cbmw.org/article.php?id=108), co-authors of The TNIV and the Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy (Broadman & Holman, 2004) . These articles and further evaluations of the TNIV are available at www.cbmw.org/resources/tniv.