Today, we seldom debate questions concerning forms of church government. People used to take these matters very seriously indeed—whether you should have bishops, or whether you should have elders, or whether you should have deacons, or whether you should be more organized according to congregational pattern. Which is the scriptural form of church organization? It probably does not make a lot of difference to most Evangelical Christians today. And yet, blood has been spilled, literally and figuratively, over an issue like that, on the basis of how people have approached Scripture. The two divergent approaches to the question of the role of women which are common among contemporary Evangelical Christians we might call the Traditional View (the majority opinion) and the Egalitarian View (the minority opinion). The Traditional View stresses submission and dependence. A woman’s role in relation to home, church and society is to be in submission to her husband (or to male leadership) and dependent upon him/them. The Egalitarian View argues that there is no scriptural reason for women not to share in leadership in the church, or to participate in a marriage relationship that is based on a principle of mutual submission and interdependent love. Each side has its texts from the New Testament. The Traditional View usually focuses on five or six texts, starting with I Corinthians 11:2-6, I Corinthians 14:33-35, I Timothy 2:11-15, Ephesians 5:22-33, 1 Peter 3:1-7. The Egalitarian View also takes these texts seriously, but it does not begin with these. It points out that if you leave these texts to the side until the end of the discussion, you will come out with a different conclusion. If you look at these texts first, you have basically programmed yourself to come to the Traditional View; but if you put these texts aside for the time being and first study all else that the Bible has to teach theologically about the role of men and women – in society and in the created order, in the Old Testament people of God and the New Testament people of God, in the church and the home – then you come to a different position.