Biblicist Means for Egalitarian Ends

Beth Allison Barr. Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2025. $24.99, 256pp.

The problem is always being the children’s mommy, or the minister’s wife and never being myself.

Betty Friedan, 1963

“But forbidden to join man in the world, can women be people? Forbidden independence, they finally are swallowed in an image of such passive dependence that they want men to make the decisions, even in the home. The frantic illusion that togetherness can impart a spiritual content to the dullness of domestic routine, the need for a religious movement to make up for the lack of identity, betrays the measure of a woman’s loss and the emptiness of the image. Could making men share the housework compensate women for the loss of their world? Could vacuuming the living-room floor together give the housewife some mysterious new purpose in life?”

Betty Friedan, 1963

In homes across the nation, housewives were tired of the vacuuming. It was not simply tired, though–there was a sense of existential distress that traveled from one to another, as women realized that their lives had become as small and tiresome as their domestic routines.

Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique documents countless stories from women, recounted in living rooms and in women’s magazines, of the psychic distress of housewives. This distress comes from a lack of self fulfillment that arises due to the monotony of modern housework and child rearing. It was written in 1963 and effectively launched the second-wave feminist movement.

Beth Allison Barr begins her new book Becoming the Pastor's Wife with a Friedan-worthy anecdote that applies the problems that occupied second-wave feminists to the church: who would do the bulletins? This is telling: Everything about Barr’s argument flows from the arguments and concerns of second-wave feminism, even if Barr herself does not necessarily state this so plainly.

Barr’s concerns in this book are twofold. 

First, in many churches “the pastor’s wife” is thought to come with the pastor as a sort of bonus. It is assumed that pastor’s wives will serve the local congregations through helping with Sunday school, organizing social events, and perhaps playing the piano. Pastor’s wives might also offer their homes (sometimes a parsonage) to entertain parishioners, as well as  offering advice or counsel to those in need from time to time. At all times, the pastor’s wife will provide a listening ear and supportive presence to her husband’s ministry. Thus “pastor’s wife” becomes a vocation in the church no less real than “pastor” but it comes without a salary, without a job description, indeed without any conversation or mutually agreed upon expectations.

This assumption, for Barr, requires that the pastor’s wife have no outside work or ambition. She cannot aspire to her own career, nor should she work outside the home. The expertise she offers to the congregation is thought to be domestic. 

Barr’s second concern draws on the first. It is that pastor’s wives are evaluated according to their adherence to an often unstated domestic norm. It is assumed that they will be doting, officious, feminine, traditionally lovely (in attire and appearance), good at cooking and baking, able to keep a clean house and attentive to her children. All of this work is thought to be given in service to the church. There is no expectation that the pastor’s wife would be compensated for her time, even the time she gives explicitly to managing and running the church behind the scenes. She gives her time  as a volunteer, but she is really functioning as a second paid staff member, just one without her own letterhead.

What Barr mostly seems concerned about here is that the “pastor’s wife” role reinforces the value of women in the home and precludes women’s participation in the workplace. By this token, women are confined to roles that denigrate their labor. A pastor’s wife must fulfill the domestic responsibilities of the household. 

In itself, there is no denigration necessary to the role. But Barr has another concern here, which is that the role is not freely chosen. A woman might marry a pastor and not desire the domesticity of the role. But her sense of outrage that such a role might be not chosen, and still expected, is also a reflection on the value of women’s labor inside and outside the home. It smells like second wave feminism, all the way through.

A significant aspect of Barr’s argument is specifically concerned with the life of women in the Southern Baptist Convention and, specifically, with the fact that things have not always been this way for SBC women. Though she does not name exactly the date the tide turned, she notes that the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC, especially after the year 2000, significantly limited women’s formal leadership in the life of the church. In 1984 the SBC sought to “reverse the trend” of ordaining women in their seminaries. In hardening Baptist prohibitions against women’s leadership, the Southern Baptist convention also embraced traditional norms of femininity that, though they may have reflected some aspects of early Christian womanhood, expanded and narrowed the ways that femininity could be properly expressed.

It is surprising that Barr shares so many of Betty Friedan’s concerns, sixty years later. Her argument, for this reason, reads as quite dated. What, then, is her real issue? Any woman now can be both a working woman, a mother, and a pastor. She just cannot do so and remain a Southern Baptist. Personally, I have not found this difficult; my whole life I have been a Christian, a woman, and never once a Southern Baptist.

But the freedom that women have to be pastors, exercised in 2025 quite freely, for Barr is not enough. It is that an organization like the SBC even exists that is her concern.

In this way, she has taken the instincts of third wave feminism, which has managed to combine the concern with women’s “rights” with women’s “equality” but moved the goal posts so much that any organization that excludes women from any role, anywhere, is a threat to all women. 

Third wave instincts observe the existence of “oppression” anywhere as a threat to justice everywhere. Third wave feminist theologians take these instincts and apply them through biblical citation, which is what Barr has done. Barr’s argument requires a recovery of women pastors throughout church history. When one adopts the assumptions of second- and third-wave feminism, anything short of that indicts the historic Christian church. In order to preserve the church catholic, Barr’s argument forces her to paint the SBC as being out of touch with historic practice.

For a historian, Barr’s argument is surprising. Though she repeatedly notes that there was never an age where women’s equality was fully actualized, she finds analogues to female pastors everywhere.

Barr notes the existence of female priests in the ancient world, in fact titling a chapter “When Women Were Priests” (in reference to Karen Jo Torjesen’s book of the same name). By her reading, “Christianity was born into a religious space familiar with women serving in religiously authoritative roles.” Barr names the Oracle of Delphi and the Vestal Virgins as two examples. But neither type of priestess was ever fully in authority–no women priestesses ever were in Greek and Roman pagan religion. True, both the Delphic Oracle and the Vestal Virgins were virgins and forbidden to marry (and also were given into their roles by their families and not given any choice in the matter themselves). They were also fully subservient to male religious authorities in their own time. Thus these examples add nothing helpful to Barr’s argument for women’s ordination today–indeed, if these were real models for how ordained women are treated today, we would be decrying human rights violations.

But even if these priestesses of pagan cults really were the mighty leaders Barr is looking for, it does not help advance her argument for the present. That something exists historically neither makes it theologically mandatory nor excludes it as out of play. Indeed, that something exists historically may serve as a rationale for its theological exclusion for current church life. It may be the case that the prevalence of female priestesses in the New Testament world is why women’s roles were somewhat restrained within the early church. Throughout history, the kind of religious practices that women have overseen have tended to collapse the transcendent and the immanent. In the Ancient Near East, female goddesses were identified with the forces of nature and the powers of life and death, collapsing the feminine powers of fertility into the more primal realities. The cult of Diana, associated with the Greek goddess Artemis, was especially prominent in Ephesus, the city where Timothy was an elder.

These cults located the primordial powers of life, death, and fertility within the powers of the goddess, associating femaleness with these primordial powers–and emphasizing, as a result, the danger of all femaleness to the world. Just as it is possible that “women were priests” in Roman religion, as Barr notes, it’s equally possible that women were not priests in early Christian religion to offer a counter to the syncretic cult worship of the goddess that was prominent at the time. Context matters, as a historian should know.

Barr also is comfortable using medieval abbesses as correlates to bishops. In one way, she is correct–both abbesses and bishops held centralized power and oversaw their own communities with authority. But the ways in which these forms of power are different are certainly more vast than what they have in common. Additionally, and more important for our concerns, medieval monasteries are quite poor analogues for Protestant churches, in almost every sense. Using female abbesses as examples of women exercising leadership provides evidence that some women have held leadership roles that were authorized by the church. But using these roles as historical precedents for ordained women misunderstands both the frequency of significant female abbesses historically, and the role of an abbess more generally.

For one thing, female abbesses primarily oversaw convents, which were communities of women. They had significant power within that domain, and the convents were equal counterparts to the male monastic orders. They also held ecclesiastical roles, and in liturgical ceremonies sometimes would have donned the garb of male clerics. And yet you would not regularly have a female abbess overseeing a community of monks, though individual monks would have served clerical roles for an abbess. In this way, Barr’s argument may in the end reinforce the SBC position on women’s leadership as primarily functioning in women’s spaces.

Arguments that use a historical precedent to make a normative argument for current practice have limited utility. 

Barr’s use of the biblical text often reflects the same hermeneutical naivety that the Southern Baptists prefer: If it exists then, it should exist now. If it didn’t, then we should not have it now, either. 

Barr does care, deeply, about the authority of the biblical text. This is evident because she looks there for a precedent for the role of “pastor’s wife.” But throughout, Barr struggles to make a consistent argument regarding “the pastor’s wife.” Is her concern that the role sets up expectations of the pastor’s wife as a “universal spare part,” and unpaid helper to her husband? This is a problem of compensation and authority. Is it that it assumes a woman might desire to partner in ministry, when she doesn’t? This would be a problem of agency. Is it that the Bible doesn’t prioritize the role, and so we shouldn’t either? This is a problem of biblical interpretation.

All three arguments appear in the book.

She takes up the question of the “biblical” basis for the role of pastor’s wife in Chapter One, “Where is Peter’s Wife?”

Barr argues that the existence-though-absence of Peter’s wife from the biblical text provides an analogue for the modern day pastor’s wife, who though she exists, may not have all that significant role in the ministry of the modern day pastor.

Barr writes that it is “safe to assume that most (if not all) of the disciples” had wives. But what role did their wives play? We know that Peter had a wife, because Jesus healed his mother in law (Matthew 8: 14-15); “we know little about the spouses of early church leaders”; “all we know about her is that she existed":

Given the amount of emphasis placed on ‘biblical’ womanhood in complementarian spaces (what women did or didn’t do in the biblical text dictates what women should or shouldn’t do in the modern church), it strikes me as odd that a role with such tenuous biblical evidence has become the primarily role highlighted for women. Simply put, Peter’s wife isn’t there. 

And that is my point.

In this passage, Barr argues that if the Bible cared so much about women supporting their husband’s ministry, it should have said so. It might have highlighted examples of other ministry wives who took upon themselves to keep the home and entertain guests, alongside preparing the bulletins of their day.

What Barr is arguing here is that the absence of a role in the Bible indicates that the role is not important. It’s rhetorical what-about-ism at its finest. This sort of interpretation–running backwards our current experience of the church and looking for evidence of it in the Bible–works in only the most rigid interpretative communities. 

Barr’s argument usually suggests that presence of a historical or biblical authoritative role for women should be normative for its existence in modern times. If it is not there, like in the case of the pastor’s wife, it doesn’t matter, but if it is there, as in the case of other female church leaders, it does matter. 

For positive biblical examples of women’s leadership, she points to Prisca and Aquila (Rom 16:3), a “ministry couple,” and notes that Prisca’s name is referenced first, which may reflect her prominence. She speculates further: “If this is so, and Prisca is the more prominent minister of the pair, then Aquila might be the first example of a minister’s husband.”

Junia, too, is “prominent among the apostles” and deserves to be recognized as a leader in the early church. Barr draws a direct analogue here to the leadership of modern women, including Sarah Lee, a southern Baptist pastor’s wife who sought to be recognized as a minister, and not a minister’s wife. By Barr’s read, the fact that women existed in leadership roles in the first century at least suggests that such a thing is possible in our time. Al Mohler, who insists that the role of minister has “for 2000 years” been limited to men, in Barr’s opinion misses that the “pastoral role… centered on preaching and teaching as well as providing ‘spiritual leadership and oversight for the congregation’”, and is exactly what Junia and Prisca were doing. By her reading these examples of women’s leaders are a direct line to female pastors in the current world.

But Barr can’t seem to tell the difference between historical evidence and historical precedents. In the first case, someone like Prisca gives witness to the fact that women existed in the early church’s leadership structure. In the case of early Roman priestesses, or reading abbesses as analogues to bishops and allowing the roles of medieval women to stand in for modern ordination, Barr wants the existence of evidence for something in the medieval world to build a strong case for its existence in modern times. In the cast of Peter’s wife, she wants the absence of something (namely a strong view of the pastor’s wife role), to exclude its significance.

But all of these examples allow history to stand in for a game of logical “gotcha”, where all the historian is responsible for is compiling clues and assembling them in the form of our current desires for our church and social orders. It’s Nancy Drew, but for politics.

But none of this is how theological reasoning, or historical reasoning, works. As we say from time to time in biblical interpretation, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but the counter holds true as well. “Evidence” of a role or figure historically or biblically does not mandate its existence in our current, churchly life.

That all of this is in a book about pastor’s wives, and not female pastors, is also notable. And this, I think, is what connects my concern with Barr’s historical method with my concern with her theological method. Barr wants to revise both sets of roles. She finds both the expectations regarding pastor’s wives to be too restrictive, and the assumption that women cannot be pastors too restrictive. What she is looking for is a loosening of social norms and cultural expectations in her local church, and she is hoping to find historical grounds for this social renovation. The loosening of social and ecclesial roles would naturally follow.

But what she ends up with is a historical and theological method that actually mimics the fundamentalism of her Southern Baptist compatriots. That something exists or doesn’t exist in the biblical text only gives the most minimalist account of whether it should exist in the modern day. We have in the Old Testament neither hand mixers nor blow dryers nor ballpoint pens. We do have leprosy and castration and trial by water. 

For this reason, I’m not sure that the nonexistence of the pastor’s wife role in the biblical text does as much work as Barr hopes, considering the nonexistence of the pastoral role in the early church.

Barr knows this, too. But her concern is not that we rehabilitate a more robust view of the pastor’s wife—not entirely. Rather, she is largely concerned that the pastor’s wife is a “dependent leadership model” that does not reflect the biblical precedent of independent female leadership. It is this independence that she is striving to rehabilitate.

Barr knows that the legacy of “biblical women” is not the egalitarian model we might hope for. But interestingly enough, she is unable to see the ways that even the most robust models of biblical women actually model quite loosely the role of the pastor’s wife. Consider this passage she quotes from historian Susan Hylen:

[Hylen] doesn’t argue that the New Testament is egalitarian (because it isn’t). Instead, she argues that ideas about female inferiority existed alongside ‘ideals that allowed and even encouraged women’s active participation in their communities.” Women led in civic and religious offices in the first century; they “used their influence and resources in powerful ways to benefit their families and communities”; they exhibited the virtues upheld for both male and female leaders (civic and religious), which would have included silence in some circumstances and authoritative advocacy in others.” 

This set of observations from Hylen, that Barr calls “beautiful”, actually closely reflect the role of “pastor’s wife.” What we see in Hylen’s early Christian women is exactly the combination of virtue, modesty, familial obligation, and agency that the pastor’s wife role outlines.

What, then, is Barr really concerned about? What she wants, I think, is for churches in the Southern Baptist Convention to reflect her views about the best organization of the social world and of the household. As far as it goes, we might hope for any number of things for our churches and ministries. But to search for our social programs in the biblical text is intellectually dishonest. As a historian, Barr should know better.