Pt. 8: Male Headship: Is it REALLY Biblical? – Women in Ministry Series

It’s undeniable that the Bible explicitly teaches that a husband is the “head” of his wife. While church history has pretty much always believed this means the husband is the primary leader in the marriage and household, there has been serious pushback against this view from egalitarian scholars in more recent years.

Time Stamps!!
0:00 – Intro
1. 10:33 – Part 1: Medical Claims That “Head” Means “Source”
2. 31:47 – Part 2: Bible Context Claims That “Head” Doesn’t Imply “Authority”
3. 54:20 – Part 3: Church History Argument
4. 1:01:10 – Part 4: The Battle of Lexicons; does kephale mean authority?
5. 1:33:33 – Conclusions

Their basic contention is that “head” doesn’t mean what you probably think it means when you read it in Scripture as the description of the relationship between husbands and wives. They tend to offer 4 main arguments to support their case:

1) In the Greek speaking world of New Testament times, general medical opinion was that the heart or liver controlled the body while the head was merely the “source” of nutrition. The egalitarians say that we need to factor in this popular medical understanding of “head” or we will mistakenly think the husband is the leader of his wife.

2) Egalitarian scholars say that when you look carefully at Paul’s use of the metaphor “head” and the specific context of the passages when it is used, you come to see that Paul is NOT meaning to imply anything about authority, but is speaking of nourishment or source. For instance, they will say that man is the source of woman in the sense that Eve was formed from Adam. Adam was her source.

3) Surprisingly, some Egalitarians will actually share a quote from Chrysostom to show that one of the church fathers understood perfectly well that this term “head” didn’t mean to imply authority. Catherine Kroeger, founder of CBE promotes this view, and many echo her.

4) Finally, we get to the biggest one. They will claim that the Greek word translated “head” really means “source” and not “authority.” I’ve found that egalitarians will repeatedly make very similar claims that ancient lexicons do not support the meaning of “authority” and that one very respected lexicon in particular (the LSJ) defends their case.

I’m going to analyze each of these claims to see what the Bible really says about husbands being the head of their wives. This is super important, because it doesn’t just impact who is in church leadership, it impacts every single marriage in the body of Christ! I can’t overstate the practical impact of getting this topic wrong, so I have spent a ton of time gathering and, more importantly, researching to properly vet and test egalitarian claims about male headship. I’ll give you the spoiler here in the description. On every single point they are very wrong, and even putting out blatant misinformation. I’ll provide both analysis and evidence to support all this in today’s video.‬

After years of being a bit confused about the topic of women in ministry, I set out to spend months researching the topic in great detail to produce this exhaustive teaching series on the topic. This is just part 8.

CLICK HERE for the playlist of ALL the videos in this series (more will be added as I make them).

To get ALL the references, you’ll need to grab my notes (for free) HERE, but here are some quick links relevant to today’s study:

• Stephen Bedale’s overly influential little paper on kephale from 1954: Click HERE
• Wayne Grudem’s initial survey of over 2000 examples of kephale (he also addresses Bedale’s): Click HERE
• Plato’s passage which refutes Payne’s use (use this same link to find 44d, where Plato speaks on this again): Click HERE
• Frank Freeman’s article on “Galen’s Ideas on Neurological Function”: Click HERE
• Catherine Kroeger’s article chopping up a quote from Chrysostom. Still on CBE’s website: Click HERE
• Egalitarians regularly quote Cervin for understanding kephale. His work is suspect but his conclusions don’t actually support their position. Here’s his article, and please don’t miss his conclusion, which supports a generally complementarian position.
• Wayne Grudem wrote a response to Cervin and several other critics which is well-worth reading HERE.
• World renowned Bill Mounce discusses the relevance of the LSJ lexicon to NT studies HERE.
• A final resource from Grudem going over 30 years of debate on kephale: Click HERE.

  I have other references and data in my notes from this series, which you can freely have through my website:
  https://BibleThinker.org