Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism is edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem. The original appeared in 1991 and won Christianity Today’s Book of the Year in 1993. Crossway published a revised edition in January 2021 with relatively minor changes.
It is a collection, not a single-author book. More than twenty contributors wrote chapters, including D. A. Carson, Thomas Schreiner, Douglas Moo, Vern Poythress, John Frame, George W. Knight III, Ray Ortlund and Elisabeth Elliot.
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 stop there. 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.
This book goes considerably further than we do. It is the founding statement of the complementarian position, and it argues in detail for specific role distinctions in the home and in church office, including that the office of elder is limited to men. That is a bigger set of claims than we make, and it is what you are buying.
It is worth being clear that this is a genuine disagreement among Christians who all treat Scripture as authoritative. Careful, Bible-believing people land on both sides. We are not going to tell you that either side is the only faithful reading.
What the book actually does
The subtitle is accurate: it was written as a response. In the late 1980s evangelical scholars were making the case that the New Testament passages on men and women had been misread, and this volume was assembled to answer them chapter by chapter.
The strongest material is the exegesis. Schreiner on 1 Timothy 2, Moo on the same passage, Carson on 1 Corinthians 14, Knight on headship: these are serious scholars engaging the Greek text and the counter-arguments rather than asserting conclusions. Whatever you conclude, this is where the complementarian case is made at full strength.
The weaker material is the cultural and social-science chapters, which have aged least well and which even sympathetic readers tend to skip.
Readability
This is a reference volume, not an evening’s reading. It runs well over five hundred pages, the register is academic, and several chapters assume familiarity with Greek and with the scholarly debate. The 2021 revision did not simplify it.
Read it selectively. Find the chapter on the passage you are actually wrestling with and read that one properly.
Who it suits
Useful if you are working through this question seriously, if you teach or lead and need to understand the complementarian case as its own advocates state it, or if you have only ever encountered it in caricature. Also useful as the counterpart to reading the other side.
Not useful as devotional reading, not useful for a general men’s group, and not the place to start if you want a short introduction.
If you want the other side
Read it alongside a serious egalitarian work rather than on its own. We review Philip Payne’s The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood, which makes the opposing case about as strongly as it can be made. Reading both will leave you better informed than most people arguing about this online.
Bottom line
The foundational complementarian volume, valuable for its exegetical chapters and dated in its cultural ones. It argues for more specificity than we do, and we will say so, while still pointing you to it as the fullest statement of that case.
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