There are books that change your mind, and there are books that make you think more carefully about how you arrived at your conclusions in the first place. Preston Sprinkle’s From Genesis to Junia is the second kind of book.
Few issues have generated as much discussion in evangelical theology as the role of women in the church, and few contemporary voices have become as influential in those discussions as Preston Sprinkle. Known to many through his popular Theology in the Raw podcast and his work on questions surrounding sexuality, gender, and the church, Sprinkle has earned a reputation for approaching controversial topics with intellectual curiosity and a willingness to challenge assumptions across theological lines.
From Genesis to Junia reflects that same approach. Sprinkle presents the book as the product of an honest attempt to discover what Scripture “actually teaches” about women in leadership. Rather than beginning with either a so-called complementarian or egalitarian1 conclusion, he invites readers to follow his study from Genesis through the New Testament. He ultimately concludes that Scripture permits women to serve in every level of church leadership, including the pastoral office. I remain convinced that Scripture reserves the pastoral office for qualified men, and Sprinkle’s arguments did not change that conviction. Yet his book did make me think more carefully about the theological assumptions that lie beneath this debate, and about how easily we can mishandle biblical categories even while trying earnestly to follow Scripture.
The book is impressive. Sprinkle has done his homework. He engages a remarkable breadth of scholarship without allowing the discussion to become inaccessible to thoughtful lay readers. Pastors and seminary students will appreciate the depth of his research, while ordinary Christians will likely find this one of the more readable introductions to the subject currently available. This is not a polemical work designed to caricature opponents but a serious attempt to persuade through careful argumentation. That alone makes the book worth reading.
Evaluation
Sprinkle’s arguments themselves will be familiar to readers who have followed the contemporary debate. Much of his case depends on disputed interpretations of familiar passages: the significance of women such as Deborah, Phoebe, and Junia; the cultural background of Ephesus; the meaning of authentein in 1 Timothy 2; and the relationship between Paul’s restrictions and his appeals to creation. Sprinkle interacts extensively with scholars on both sides, though I did not always find his treatment of the egalitarian scholarship persuasive. At several points, his argument seems to move from weighing the evidence to appealing to what simply appears most reasonable or intuitive, and those judgments tend to favor the egalitarian reading. I did not find them sufficient to overturn the straightforward reading of the passages that restrict the pastoral office to qualified men. A full exegetical response would require far more space than a review like this allows. More importantly for my purposes, others have addressed those questions far more capably than I could here.2 What interested me most as I read was the theological framework that makes those interpretations compelling in the first place.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its insistence that complementarians avoid lazy arguments. Sprinkle repeatedly demonstrates that women throughout Scripture occupy far more significant roles than many churches have acknowledged. They proclaim God’s Word, disciple believers, exercise wisdom, correct error, and participate actively in God’s saving work. Whatever one’s conclusions regarding the pastoral office or leadership more generally, the church needs this reminder. Complementarian churches have sometimes unintentionally communicated that if women are not pastors, then their opportunities for meaningful ministry are severely limited. Scripture presents a much richer picture than that. Even readers who ultimately reject Sprinkle’s conclusions should come away asking whether their congregations encourage women to exercise the many gifts God has given them.
At the same time, I found myself increasingly convinced that beneath the exegetical disagreements lie more fundamental differences in how the biblical evidence is organized. From Genesis to Junia largely operates within a contemporary evangelical framework in which ministry is discussed in terms of gifting, leadership, teaching, and authority. Confessional Lutheran theology organizes that evidence differently because Scripture also gives us the category of a divinely instituted public ministry, which Evangelicalism has largely jettisoned. The question is not simply who may perform particular functions, but whom Christ has entrusted with responsibility for publicly administering his Word and Sacraments and shepherding his flock.
This distinction matters because many of Sprinkle’s arguments move from what women are shown doing in Scripture to what offices they may hold. Women teach, prophesy, correct, and speak God’s Word, and Sprinkle is right to insist that we take those examples seriously. But the pastoral office is not simply the sum of those activities. A woman speaking God’s Word does not thereby become a pastor any more than every man who teaches, exhorts, or evangelizes becomes one. The question is not whether women can do things that pastors also do, but whom Christ has entrusted with responsibility for the public ministry of his Word and Sacraments. When ministry is defined primarily by its functions, examples demonstrating the breadth of women’s service can easily become arguments for their eligibility for the office.
Something similar happens in Sprinkle’s treatment of authority itself. One of his recurring themes is that Jesus and Paul replace authority with service. Certainly, Jesus rejects domineering leadership, and Christian authority is never self-serving. Yet the New Testament does not abolish authority; it transforms how authority is exercised. Jesus remains Lord even while washing his disciples’ feet. Pastoral authority likewise does not make the pastor more important than other Christians; it makes him responsible for something Christ has entrusted to him. As I found myself writing in the margin, “God gives pastors to be responsible, not powerful.”
This is where the different theological frameworks matter. When Paul restricts the pastoral responsibility to qualified men, he is not denying women gifts that they clearly possess or ministries that Scripture elsewhere commends. He is identifying who is to bear responsibility for a particular office. That theological distinction does not replace exegesis; the relevant passages must still establish who may hold the office. But neither do examples of women teaching, leading, or speaking God’s Word establish the opposite. Our theological categories, themselves drawn from and accountable to Scripture, help us understand what particular pieces of biblical evidence actually prove.
Recommendation
The greatest value I found in From Genesis to Junia was not in Sprinkle’s conclusions, but in the questions his argument forced me to ask about my own theological assumptions. Lutheran pastors need to ask those questions whether they read this book or not. What is the pastoral office? What is authority? How should we distinguish between the authority of God’s Word, the gifts of believers, Christian vocation, and the public office of the ministry? Reading Sprinkle is one way to bring those questions into focus, but the more important task is to ensure that our answers, and the categories behind them, are continually being formed by Scripture.
That, perhaps more than anything else, is why I found Sprinkle’s book worth reading. His conclusion regarding the pastoral office is contrary to Scripture, despite the sincerity and scholarship with which he reaches it. But it would be a mistake for Lutheran readers simply to identify where Sprinkle goes wrong, close the book, and congratulate ourselves for having arrived at the right answer. We must also ask whether the theological categories by which we understand that answer are themselves being continually formed by Scripture.
It is possible, after all, to retain a biblical conclusion while gradually losing the biblical theology that supports it. A Lutheran congregation may firmly maintain that the pastoral office is reserved for qualified men while subtly beginning to treat the pastor as the one who does the congregation’s spiritually significant work. Sometimes that assumption may come from pastors themselves; sometimes it comes from members who understandably regard their highly trained pastor as the person best equipped to teach, counsel, evangelize, or speak God’s Word. But the result can be a functional sacerdotalism in which the pastor becomes the professional minister while the ministry of other Christians is diminished. Ironically, that makes arguments like Sprinkle’s more compelling: if teaching, proclaiming, counseling, or rightly administering sacraments are what make someone a minister, then examples of women doing those things naturally become arguments for women holding the pastoral office. The Lutheran answer is not to diminish those examples, but to recover the distinction between the many ways Christians serve one another with God’s Word and the particular public responsibility Christ has entrusted to the pastoral office.
Our theological architecture does not stand over Scripture; it is built from Scripture and remains accountable to Scripture. The goal is not to preserve Lutheran categories simply because they are Lutheran, but to preserve the distinctions Scripture itself gives us. Reading Sprinkle did not persuade me to reconsider whether women may serve as pastors. It did make me reconsider whether I understand and can clearly articulate the biblical theology behind why they may not.