Bob Hostetler > Book Reviews

Good News For Women

"Historical, biblical, and theological considerations", writes Stanley J. Grenz "converge not only in allowing, but also in insisting, that women serve as full partners with men" in the work of the Christian church. His book (coauthored with Denise Muir Kjesbo), Women in the Church: A Biblical Theology of Women in Ministry is one of the best- perhaps THE best treatment I’ve ever read on the subject of women’s roles in churches, marriage, and family.

Grenz and Kjesbo are always respectful toward those who espouse a hierarchy for church and family based on gender roles, but their case for an egalitarian theology of women’s roles is extremely thorough and compelling.

While I recommend Grenz and Kjesbo’s Women in the Church as perhaps the best example of the superior scholarship being performed today by egalitarian theologians and expositors, two other treatments deserve mention. Gretchen Gaebelein Hull’s Equal to Serve (1987) and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis’s Good News for Women (1997) treat the subject admirably.

Taken together, these three books (among many other fine choices) make a compelling and completely biblical case for gender equality.

Copyright © 2005, Bob Hostetler