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RBMW remains venerable defense of complementarianism

October 14, 2007
By CBMW
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Sixteen years after its first publication, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, is more crucial to the gender debate than ever before.  

rbmw.jpgCurious as to what the debate over the Bible and gender is all about? Want to learn more about complementarianism? Want to know what Paul meant when he wrote "the women should keep silent in the churches?" Then look no further than the award-winning 1991 book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism.

Republished with an updated cover and a new preface in 2006 by Crossway Books, the work stands nearly two decades later as the monumental defense of traditional, biblical gender roles in the home and church. With its original release, RBMW was named Christianity Today's Book of the Year for 1993.

The work is edited by complementarian stalwarts John Piper and Wayne Grudem and includes essays by a renowned group of evangelical ministers and scholars, including Piper, Grudem, Elisabeth Elliott, Dorothy Patterson, Paige Patterson, John M. Frame, Vern S. Poythress, Thomas R. Schreiner, and D.A. Carson, among numerous others.

As CBMW leaders Ligon Duncan and Randy Stinson point out in the preface to the second edition, the work is perhaps more necessary today than it was at the time of its original release with egalitarianism and feminism holding sway in many churches, evangelical schools, and homes.

"While evangelical complementarians have delivered an impressive body of exegetical and theological argument . . . there has been a continuing erosion of commitment to the church's classic understanding of what the Bible teaches about male-female role relationships," they write.

"An increasing number of evangelical publishers (once bastions of conservatism regarding gender roles) are publishing books from a feminist perspective, and some of them now refuse to print anything that assumes or advances complementarianism. Likewise, well-regarded campus ministries have adopted and implemented functionally egalitarian patterns of ministry, and many evangelical faculties, even in the most conservative of institutions, promote egalitarianism."

RBMW is comprehensive in its treatment of the pertinent issues, ranging from the biblical meaning of headship to head coverings and an examination of gender issues in church history.

One of our goals at CBMW is to make solid Biblical resources like RBMW widely available to serve individual believers and local churches.  For this reason, the entire text of the book is available free in downloadable PDF format.  For those people who enjoy the pleasure of a tree-based, cover-bound, personal-note-scribbling book (like we are at CBMW) RBMW  is now the featured product at the CBMW webstore and available at a 35 percent discount.

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