The Christian Woman...Set Free: Women Freed From Second-Class Citizenship in the Kingdom of God

by Gene Edwards

Seventeen hundred years is enough! Edwards leads the call to vanquish the inequality of women in the kingdom of God. His weapons of revelation? History, the Greek language, and his own witness of women in churches who are free.

The author challenges Christian ministers to take up the cause of eliminating inequality in the church and dare to discover what happens in the body of Christ when all members function.

The author goes to the root of our present-day Bible translations and lays the axe to the centuries-old tree of mistranslation. You will be shocked to discover that the King James Version does not say what the original Greek text said about women in Paul's letters (and neither do most other Bible translations).

This book brings to light the mindset that has held both women and men prisoners of misconceptions through the centuries. Reading The Christian Woman...Set Free liberates the reader of any doubt regarding a woman's place in the kingdom of God. (You will be awed as you see that the greatest friend of women in all of human history, the Lord Jesus Christ, broke all the rules of his day in regard to the treatment of women.)

Best of all, what makes The Christian Woman...Set Free unique is that it is not based on theory, nor is it an intellectual treatise. It is a revolutionary document forged on the anvil of the author's experiences in daily church life. Edwards writes from a matrix where equality is a way of life and full participation in the church is the territory of both men and women. Edwards give you the practical how-to of the way to experience this freedom in your gathering. There are testimonies in the book of women who experience freedom to share in all the functions of the church. In their churches there is no specific leader, but all are joint leaders.

The Christian Woman...Set Free is a fast paced, high-energy book that takes dead aim at the very foundation of our present-day mindset concerning women and men in church life.

202 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2005

About the author

Gene Edwards is one of America's most beloved Christian authors. He has published over 25 best-selling books, and his signature work, "The Divine Romance," has been called a masterpiece of Christian literature. He has written biblical fiction covering nearly the entire Bible, with titles that include the following: "The Beginning," "The Escape," "The Birth," "The Divine Romance," "The Triumph," "Revolution," "The Silas Diary," "The Titus Diary," "The Timothy Diary," "The Priscilla Diary," "The Gaius Diary," and "The Return."

Gene grew up in the East Texas oil fields and entered college at the age of 15. He graduated from East Texas State University at 18 with a bachelor's degree in English history and received his M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Gene is part of the house-church movement, and he travels extensively to aid Christians as they begin meeting in homes rather than in church buildings. He also conducts conferences on living the deeper Christian life.

Gene and his wife, Helen, reside in Jacksonville, Florida, and have two grown children.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Whew, this is bad. I anticipated liking, or at least appreciating this book. I have very much enjoyed the one other book I've read by the author (A Tale of Three Kings). But this one, though I believe to have been well intentioned, was tedious, uncharitable, poorly written, and poorly argued. I actually think his proposals for interpretation of a few texts of Scripture were not without merit, though he did not persuade me of their greater probability. His agenda came across more powerfully than his exegesis, and his scholarship and exegesis were presented in such a subpar fashion that it was harder to see his position as fully reasonable. Also, I dove in deeper with his main historical nemesis, Jerome, and found his treatment of him completely one-sided, ignoring or ignorant of contrary biographical data and meaningful historical context. His lack of necessary historical nuance (nobody is as big a fan of the more distasteful statements of Jerome as he accuses) is matched by his absolute dogmatism that his minority report biblical interpretation is absolutely settled against the greater history of interpretation (blame Jerome, of course). Unfortunately, he rarely cites sources. He leans heavily at times on Will Durant, and the knowledgeable reader has good reason to question his wisdom in doing so. He misattributes and misquotes sources (sometimes making the sources for his quotations harder to find). In the end, I simply did not find the book trustworthy.

In the end, it reminded me of War in The Pews by Chester Weigle I reviewed about a year ago. Neither left me with any good impression of the house church movement.

[Josh Freund · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book, as I agree with the premise that women are too often treated as second-class citizens within the church, in part because of likely misinterpretations of Scripture. Unfortunately, Gene's overly enthusiastic / casual writing style came off as amateurish and made it hard to take him seriously. He also didn't do a great job of backing up his arguments, frequently just stating something and moving on as if it was fact rather than providing references to support his claims.

Then there's the bizarre ending section, where he veers off into his opinions (stated as if they were truths) on how men and women can most fully be themselves within the church and how the house church he's a part of operates in a way that's undeniably better (if you were to take his word as fact) than any traditional church setup.

[Frances · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book very interesting and the history quite enlightening. Yes, the early church fathers were taught Greek philosophy and it has caused no end of trouble in the church especially for women. I find even more interesting the ideas about how to set both women and men free in Christian assembly. Would like to try it sometime.