Why We Can't Think Biblically About It： Women In Ministry part 1

Mike Winger introduces his Women in Ministry series, explaining he spent months studying the topic and it hurt his YouTube channel output.

Series introduction

The series will cover all biblical issues related to women in ministry; this first video serves as an introduction to the debate.

Series introduction

Mike's stated goal is to teach people how to think biblically rather than just declaring what is true, enabling independent biblical reasoning.

Series introduction — Mike's teaching philosophy

The biggest problem in the women in ministry debate is that people have rules that bypass scripture entirely, preventing biblical thinking.

Framing the central thesis of this video

Women in ministry is a secondary issue — not about the gospel or salvation — but tensions are extremely high because of these pre-biblical mistakes.

Framing the central thesis of this video

Mike will address seven huge mistakes people make that prevent biblical thinking on women in ministry.

Framing the central thesis — overview of seven mistakes

Definition of complementarianism: women and men are equal in value but have different roles, particularly that women should not serve as elders.

Framing the debate — defining key terms

Definition of egalitarianism: equality in both personhood and role, with no limits on what women can do in the church including serving as elders.

Framing the debate — defining key terms

Women in ministry is a secondary issue — sincere believers on both sides are still Christians, and it is not worth dividing over.

Mike's personal framing of the debate

Despite being secondary, this issue has massive practical impact on women's ministry, marriage, church choice, and which teachers to follow.

Why this topic matters practically

Exploring the range of practical questions: women as deacons, youth leaders, worship leaders, and non-pastoral teachers like Krista Bontrager and Jen Wilkin.

Scope of practical questions raised by this debate

For egalitarians these role questions are easy; for complementarians they require nuance. Examples include women theologians like Nancy Pearcey and the debate over women seminary teachers (John Piper opposes it).

Scope of practical questions raised by this debate

Women as authors and book endorsements — Mike endorsed Natasha Crain's book 'Faithfully Different' and asks whether that endorsement is acceptable.

Scope of practical questions raised by this debate

The question of women as guest speakers on Sunday mornings, referencing Joni Eareckson Tada as an example.

Scope of practical questions raised by this debate

Women bloggers, podcasters, and YouTubers like Alisa Childers raise the same questions — she has more impact than most pastors.

Scope of practical questions raised by this debate

Additional practical questions: interviewing women, women on church boards, women evangelists, conference speakers, voting for a woman president, women as bosses, stay-at-home dads.

Scope of practical questions raised by this debate

Can a woman correct a man's theology? Can a woman serve communion? The uncertainty causes women to hold back even from things they could do.

Scope of practical questions raised by this debate

Mike's personal journey: he wanted to become egalitarian, prioritized egalitarian scholarship, read Philip Payne and Linda Belleville, but did not change his mind.

Mike's personal stance and research journey

More has been written on women in ministry than perhaps any other issue in recent Christian scholarship.

Framing the volume of the debate

Self-assessment recommendation: ask yourself what view you WANT to have, to identify your own biases before studying.

Preparing to study the topic honestly

Series roadmap: Video 1 covers bypassing the Bible with bad logic; Video 2 covers Genesis 1-3 and whether the creation account supports male authority.

Series overview and roadmap

Video 3 will cover women in leadership in the Old Testament, including Deborah and egalitarian surveys of female leadership.

Series overview and roadmap

Video 4 will address women in the New Testament: women as apostles, elders, deacons, and teachers, including the Junia question.

Series overview and roadmap

Video 5 will cover Galatians 3:28 ('no male or female in Christ') — the egalitarian 'trump card.'

Series overview and roadmap

Video 6 will cover headship — whether husbands are 'head' of their wives. Egalitarians reject or redefine 'head' (kephale).

Series overview and roadmap

Video 7 will study the head coverings passage in 1 Corinthians 11 in great detail.

Series overview and roadmap

Video 8 will cover 1 Corinthians 14 — women being silent in the church.

Series overview and roadmap

Video 9 will cover 1 Timothy 2 — the key complementarian passage about women not teaching or having authority over men, including the word authentein and the cult of Artemis.

Series overview and roadmap

Video 10 will be entirely about application — what ministry opportunities women should say yes or no to.

Series overview and roadmap

Mike transitions to the main content: many people bypass the Bible on women in ministry, holding views based on philosophical beliefs rather than scripture.

Transition to main content — bypassing the Bible

Analogy to Trinity denial: some reject the Trinity not from scripture but from a philosophical conviction that 'three in one' is impossible, then read the Bible through that lens.

Bypassing the Bible — analogy

Direct address to women in ministry: Mike is not questioning their hearts, impact, or calling them false teachers simply because they are women who teach.

Pastoral aside to women in ministry

Mistake #1: Using life experience to answer what the Bible says — 'I know I'm called' as a bypass of scripture.

Mistake #1: Life experience overriding scripture

Life experience bypasses scripture on both sides: 'A woman pastor ministered to me' (egalitarian) or 'Women have frequently been false teachers' (complementarian).

Mistake #1: Life experience overriding scripture

Mistake #2: Believing women in ministry is simply a result of the evils of feminism.

Mistake #2: Evils of feminism

Mistake #3: Believing it is the 'evils of patriarchy' that must be fought — egalitarians who frame complementarians as patriarchalists use privilege/power language to bypass scripture.

Mistake #3: Evils of patriarchy

This anti-patriarchy presupposition leads egalitarian scholars to one of two conclusions: the Bible does not teach patriarchy, or the Bible teaches it and is wrong.

Mistake #3: Evils of patriarchy

Mistake #4: Believing that equality of personhood philosophically rules out differences in roles. Mike introduces Rebecca Merrill Groothuis and her work.

Mistake #4: Equality of personhood rules out role differences

Groothuis's argument appears in chapter 20 of 'Discovering Biblical Equality' — a brand new edition of the premier egalitarian multi-author volume that Mike read including an advance copy.

Mistake #4: Equality of personhood rules out role differences

Groothuis's syllogism: if women's subordination is permanent, comprehensive, and ontologically grounded, then women are inferior persons; women are not inferior; therefore subordination is unjustified.

Mistake #4: Analyzing Groothuis's syllogism

Mike agrees women are not inferior persons but argues that submissive roles and inferior personhood are not the same thing — children submit to parents, employees to bosses.

Mistake #4: Rebutting Groothuis's syllogism

Groothuis's three qualifications — permanent, comprehensive, ontologically grounded — do not describe what complementarians actually believe or what the Bible teaches.

Mistake #4: Rebutting Groothuis's qualifications

Rebuttal: women's submission is not permanent — it is limited to this life, and Christians should not view this life as their permanent state. Most Christians permanently submit to elders anyway.

Mistake #4: Rebutting 'permanent'

Rebuttal: women's submission is not comprehensive — Groothuis claims there is 'no area in which a woman has any authority, privilege, or opportunity that a man is denied,' which massively overstates complementarian claims.

Mistake #4: Rebutting 'comprehensive'

Many egalitarians expand male authority to its most monstrous extreme to make it intolerable, causing readers to reject complementarianism before ever reading the Bible.

Mistake #4: Egalitarian rhetorical strategy

Groothuis's argument only works against an extreme form of complementarianism that most complementarians would also reject — it attacks a straw man.

Mistake #4: Straw man critique

Rebuttal: women's submission is not ontologically grounded — it is not rooted in women's nature making them inherently submissive.

Mistake #4: Rebutting 'ontologically grounded'

Groothuis defines 'human' as having higher rational functions including decision-making, then argues that denying women leadership over men is inherently dehumanizing.

Mistake #4: Analyzing Groothuis's definition of human

Mike argues unexpressed human capacities do not make someone less human — children who die young have unexpressed capacities but are not less human.

Mistake #4: Rebutting Groothuis's definition of human

The Levite analogy: Levites had exclusive priestly roles based on tribal lineage (nature), not ability — yet non-Levites were not less human. Groothuis addresses but does not defeat this.

Mistake #4: Levite analogy against Groothuis

If countless generations under Levitical role restrictions for hundreds of years is acceptable, why would one lifetime of gender-based role differences be dehumanizing?

Mistake #4: Levite analogy continued

Groothuis's rebuttal that prophets had more authority than Levites is a red herring — Levites were the regular, widespread spiritual authorities throughout Israel.

Mistake #4: Levite analogy — responding to Groothuis's counter

Tom Schreiner's response to Groothuis: egalitarians face the 'daunting prospect' of saying non-priestly Israelites had less dignity than Levites.

Mistake #4: Schreiner's critique of Groothuis

Additional analogy: only a son of David could be king of Israel — this eliminates most people from the highest authority by nature, yet does not make them less human.

Mistake #4: Davidic kingship analogy

Israel as God's chosen nation is another example: other nations could not qualify no matter how faithful, yet this does not make them less human.

Mistake #4: Chosen nation analogy

A possibility Groothuis ignores: role can be associated with nature but not grounded in nature — God assigns roles by association, not by saying one nature is inferior.

Mistake #4: The overlooked possibility

Possible non-inferiority reasons for role differences: picturing Christ and the Church, societal order, or unstated divine purposes. Groothuis rejects all of these.

Mistake #4: Alternative explanations Groothuis ignores

Even if Groothuis is right philosophically, her conclusion explicitly blocks Bible reading — she says there can be 'no biblical or theological warrant' for women's submission, which pre-determines what the Bible is allowed to say.

Mistake #4: How Groothuis's argument bypasses scripture

Philip Payne's related argument in 'Man and Woman, One in Christ': if we are equal in Christ, we cannot exclude anyone from leadership based on gender.

Mistake #4: Payne's variant of the philosophical argument

Mike's rebuttal to Payne: role differences are about God's calling/assignment, not nature or equality in Christ. Payne's logic would make eldership part of what it means to be Christian.

Mistake #4: Rebutting Payne

Both Groothuis and Payne's philosophical arguments kill Bible study by leaving only two options: the Bible supports egalitarianism, or the Bible is wrong.

Mistake #4: Conclusion

Mistake #5: The argument that complementarianism leads to abuse and is therefore wrong — the most common argument Mike encounters.

Mistake #5: Complementarianism leads to abuse

Story-driven theology uses real horrific abuse examples to claim they are the automatic result of complementarianism, which keeps people from reading the Bible.

Mistake #5: Story-driven theology

Beth Allison Barr's 'The Making of Biblical Womanhood' as a prime example of story-driven theology — the book frames the entire discussion through personal pain and church hurt.

Mistake #5: Critique of Beth Allison Barr's book

Barr equates complementarianism with abuse — 'you cannot separate the issues' — making the book about stories creating theology rather than understanding scripture in context.

Mistake #5: Critique of Beth Allison Barr's book

Barr uses the story of a rude complementarian male student to overrule Russell Moore's distinction between pagan patriarchy and biblical complementarianism.

Mistake #5: Barr's story overruling theological argument

Barr's argument: personal stories overrule any theological distinction — 'nice try, tell that to my story' — all nuance and distinction between pagan patriarchy and complementarianism is erased.

Mistake #5: Stories overruling scripture

Discovering Biblical Equality chapter 28 argues complementarianism causes domestic abuse from a social science perspective.

Mistake #5: Academic version of the abuse argument

Quote from Discovering Biblical Equality: complementarianism is 'by definition a system of permanently unequal power distribution' that creates conditions under which abuse flourishes.

Mistake #5: Academic version of the abuse argument

Mike's rebuttal: the argument that complementarianism causally relates to domestic violence does not pass the 'smell test' when applied consistently to other authority structures.

Mistake #5: Rebuttal via analogy

Extending the analogy: church authority has been abused, boss-employee relationships have been abusive — should we abolish all authority structures?

Mistake #5: Rebuttal via analogy continued

Abuse can be addressed without proving egalitarians are right — let egalitarians be right because of biblical arguments, not extra-biblical ones. This was probably the biggest reason Mike did not become egalitarian.

Mistake #5: Conclusion

The reverse would also be invalid: blaming egalitarians for divorce rates and dysfunctional homes would equally bypass scripture.

Mistake #5: Showing the argument works both ways

Mistake #6: Thinking submission is inherently evil — submission was not a bad word in biblical culture, though it is in modern culture.

Mistake #6: Submission is inherently evil

Linda Belleville is so opposed to submission that she argues nobody had authority in the early church — not even Jesus or the apostles.

Mistake #6: Belleville's extreme position on authority

Mistake #7: Picking one passage to rule all the rest — both sides do this, creating contradictions within the Bible rather than seeking unified understanding.

Mistake #7: One passage rules the rest

Egalitarians do the same with Galatians 3:28; Thomas Schreiner argues no single set of texts should function as a prism controlling the others.

Mistake #7: One passage rules the rest — egalitarian side

When all scripture is examined in detail, a beautiful balance emerges — like Mike's previous study on alcohol, which showed positive and negative passages creating a nuanced view.

Mistake #7: The benefit of a unified biblical approach

Three commitments: (1) Mike will not submit scripture to culture — neither progressive nor conservative cultural pressure.

Three things Mike will NOT do in this series

Three commitments: (2) Mike will not play games with polemic or moral pressure — the series will be easy to listen to because it is Bible study, not rhetoric.

Three things Mike will NOT do in this series

Three commitments: (3) Mike will not be 'God's PR department' — he will not avoid truths or fail to confront false beliefs to make Christianity palatable.

Three things Mike will NOT do in this series

Preview of Genesis 1-3 debate: creation order, Adam naming Eve, Eve as climax of creation, Adam blamed for the fall, dominion given to both, 'your husband will rule over you' — with complementarian and egalitarian responses to each.

Preview of next video (Video 2)

Closing: Mike welcomes viewers to the series, expects low view counts but prioritizes depth, and announces a Friday live Q&A at 1 PM Pacific.

Closing remarks