Sarah Sumner bringing egalitarian “middle way” to RTS event

Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) in Orlando will play host to "Synergy 2005" this weekend (Nov. 11-12), an event designed to encourage evangelical women in the ministry, but one of its keynote speakers may raise the eyebrows of some in the evangelical community.

RTS, a soundly complementarian Presbyterian institution built upon the venerable Westminster Standards, has invited Sarah Sumner, who claims to be neither an egalitarian nor a complementarian, as one of its keynote speakers.

Judy Douglass and Carolyn Custis James are also slated to speak at the conference. The event is aimed at the edification, equipping, and encouraging of women in ministry.

While leaders on both sides of the gender debate admit that there is no real middle ground, Sumner claims to have forged a via media in the gender debate between complementarianism and egalitarianism. She presently serves as chair of the department of ministry, and associate professor of ministry and theology at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, Calif.

In her 2003 book Men and Women in the Church: Building Consensus on Christian Leadership (IVP), Sumner presents a case for a middle ground that interprets "the debate within evangelicalism and explains why the two sides collide." However, as Wayne Grudem has expertly pointed out in his 2004 work Evangelical Feminism & Biblical Truth (www.efbt100.com), Sumner’s views are decidedly egalitarian (see p. 806 of the index of the book for a listing of pages in which Grudem interacts with Sumner's interpretations).

For example, Sumner interprets 2 Tim. 4:1-2 as charging both men and women to "preach the word." In her book Sumner uses personal anecdote, not sound exegesis, and fails to point out that the commands in 2 Tim 4:1-2 are all singular imperatives addressed specifically to Timothy, Grudem points out. Asserting that a "straightforward reading of 1 Tim. 2:8-15 is absurd," Sumner argues both for female pastors and preachers.

Regarding gender roles in the home, Sumner argues that "nowhere in Scripture is a husband told to lead his wife." Further, in her book, Sumner says the notion of a husband leading his wife is an idea invented by complementarians. She also makes this argument in the November issue of Christianity Today (CT), in an article entitled "Bridging the Ephesians 5 Divide." In the article, Sumner calls the complementarian view of gender roles in the home a model that is akin to a "boss-assistant" workplace arrangement.

"[I]t is often assumed that the word head (in Eph. 5) means ‘leader’—though the Bible never says the husband is the ‘leader’ of his wife," Sumner writes in CT. "The mystery of one flesh is exchanged for a business model in which the husband is the boss and the wife his assistant."

While she does assert a wife’s biblical duty to submit to her husband from Eph. 5, Sumner postulates a view the amounts to "mtual submission," a view typically espoused by egalitarians.

For a critique of Sumner's Men and Women in the Church, see the review by Dorothy Patterson in the Spring 2003 issue of the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (http://www.cbmw.org/journal/editions/8-1.pdf). For a complementarian response to the egalitarian view of "mutual submission," see Wayen Grudem, "The Myth of Mutual Submission as an Interpretation of Ehpesians 5:21," in Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood, available in its entirety online at http://www.cbmw.org/resources/books/BiblicalFoundations.pdf.