Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose

 

Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose – Aimee Byrd

This book is an angry response to “Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood” by John Piper and Wayne Grudem.  In 20^th and 21^st century Christianity, there’s an awful lot of talk out there about what role a woman should have within the church walls and in society in general. To say this is controversial is a huge understatement.  Author Aimee Byrd sets out to make the case that women have been subjugated far too long, and this idea of complementarianism isn’t as biblical as many of today’s evangelical protestants seem to think.  I agree with her argument.  Sadly, though, this really isn’t a good book.   In fact, I though the writing was…well…pretty boring and dreadful.   All of us know how to talk, write, and communicate, yet most of us don’t really do all of them that well. Writing a book that keeps an audience’s attention is not as easy as it sounds.

This is a book that I found so boring that it took me forever to finish (I tend to put down the boring ones for “later” and then start newer books.  I kept forcing myself to pick this one back up and trudge forward and longer and longer intervals), so there’s a lot of it I really don’t even remember. Not only that, but when I WAS reading it, it was hard to stay focused and keep my mind from wandering.  Some of this book (well, a LOT of this book), I had to simply skim some of the chapters.  In fact, it’s even painful as I write this review; I just can’t really even remember much about the book to give specific examples nor heartfelt reflections.

As I recall, she starts this thing with some sort of analogy about a subjugated woman who lived in the 19^th century.  She resided in a room that had yellow wallpaper. Eventually the woman went so bonkers that she ended up pealing and tearing the yellow wallpaper off the walls.  Note the cover of this book.  So the author is always making references to “having to tear down yellow wallpaper” throughout the entire book.  It was quite monotonous and annoying.  I was never tempted to tear yellow wallpaper while reading this book, but I was tempted the throw my Kindle across the room.

She then plods through some of the Biblical accounts to make her point, which aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just boring.  I seem to remember one of the chapters was a rather long expository on the book of Ruth.   Remember those boring professors you had back in college that couldn’t keep the students awake 10 minutes into a lecture?  This is what we have here.  I’ve often complained about boring books by making a comparison of reading a Wikipedia article.  This book was worse. This book was like reading the footnotes (many pages of them) to a boring Wikipedia article.

She then drones on about the church, and how important the church is. She talks about the rise of the “para church” and how embracing a concept doesn’t achieve a church’s true goals.  It’s again, mightily boring, and she seems to have strayed from the supposed topic, which is how women should be revered and treated in the church.

She just doesn’t seem to know how to hold a reader’s attention.  None of her stories are particularly riveting, and she doesn’t seem to understand that loads and loads of facts presented on page after page doesn’t quite cut it.  She needs more feeling. She needs more emotion.  What she really needed was a co-author.

For a much better book around the same subject, I would recommend Beth Allison Barr’s book “The Making of Biblical Womanhood”.