Book Review: Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Byrd)

By Zachary Garris - Posted at Knowing Scripture:

Aimee Byrd has created some controversy with her new book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose. The title is clearly aimed at the 1991 collection of essays edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (RBMW hereafter).

That book defended and promoted the view known as “complementarianism,” which holds that a man is to lead in the home and that only men can be pastors. The organization behind RBMW is known as the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), and its theological views are expressed in the Danvers Statement. Byrd actually criticizes this organization more than the book that her title is named after.

There have been plenty of attacks over the years on complementarianism, but usually from the feminist/egalitarian side. What makes Byrd’s book unique is that she is a member of a conservative denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), and would presumably fall into the complementarian camp. Byrd joins fellow OPC member Rachel Green Miller, who published Beyond Authority and Submission in the fall of 2019, in their attempted critique of complementarianism (see my review of Miller’s book).

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