The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood: How God’s Word Consistently Affirms Gender Equality is by Philip B. Payne, a New Testament scholar. Zondervan published it on April 4, 2023. It runs 256 pages.
Know what you are buying. This is a book with a thesis, and the thesis is egalitarian. Payne holds that men and women share authority in the church and in marriage with no permanent hierarchy between them. His argument is that the passages usually read as teaching male headship and female submission teach something closer to the opposite once you work through the original languages and the situations they were written into.
How he builds the case
Payne works through fourteen passages from the Old and New Testaments. For each one he goes into the Greek or Hebrew wording, the historical and cultural setting, and other places in Scripture that bear on the question. The passages you would expect are all here, including the ones in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy that carry most of the weight in this argument.
The best structural decision in the book: every chapter ends with detailed answers to the standard objections. Payne states the counterargument and then responds to it. That makes the book genuinely useful even if you disagree with him, because you can see exactly where the disagreement sits instead of guessing.
Where we land, and where this book goes further
Our position at CalledToBetter is that men and women are equal in worth and dignity before God, and that Scripture describes distinct roles for them. We do not go further than that. Where the Bible speaks plainly, we hold to it. Where it does not, we are not going to hand you a chart of who does what, because that chart tends to say more about the person drawing it than about Scripture.
Payne goes further than we do, in the other direction. His thesis is not simply that men and women are equal in worth, which we agree with. It is that there are no permanent role distinctions at all, and that every passage appearing to teach one has been misread. That is a bigger claim, and it is the claim you are buying.
This is a live disagreement among Christians who all take Scripture as authoritative, and careful people land on both sides. The complementarian side has published responses, including a critical review from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. If you are working this out, read both.
Payne does not dodge the difficult texts or argue around them. His whole method is to go straight at them and contend over what they say. Whether he gets it right is a separate question from whether he is careful, and he is careful.
Readability
The organization is good and the chapters stand alone well enough to read out of order. It is still a scholarly book. There is Greek, there is grammar, and there are footnotes. A motivated reader with no seminary training can follow it, but not quickly and not while distracted.
Who should read it
Worth your time if you are actually working through this question, if you are in leadership and need to understand the egalitarian case as its strongest advocates state it, or if you already hold that view and want the scholarship under it. Skip it if you want a light read or a settled answer handed to you.
One note if you are thinking about a group study: this topic splits rooms. Read it yourself first and decide honestly whether your group can discuss it well before you order copies.
Bottom line
A careful, heavily argued case for the egalitarian reading of Scripture from a scholar who engages the objections instead of ignoring them. We do not land where Payne lands, and we will say so. We also think this is the book to read if you want that case made at its strongest. Read it next to a solid complementarian response and you will understand this debate better than most people arguing about it online.
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