The Evangelical Theological Society has its first female president. But what about intellectual life for women in the pews?
The scandal of the evangelical mind is pink.
Or to put it less dramatically, there’s another scandal of the evangelical mind—beyond the widely recognized one, introduced by Mark Noll’s landmark book and rightly the topic of conversation for 30 years since—that has yet to receive the attention it requires. This is the scandal of the intellectual life of Christian women, and it is only becoming more acute, even alongside milestones like the election of the first female president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS).
After all, the conversation about women in the ETS, while significant, pertains to very few women—those in academia and, therefore, in attendance at this kind of conference. But what about the vast majority of Christian women, those whose primary calling is outside the ivory tower?
It would be easy to turn this conversation into a lament over the doors closed to talented women scholars who would have made excellent academics, had that path been open for them. We can consider Dorothy Sayers as a particularly famous example. She solved her own scandal of the evangelical mind with a brilliant intellectual career outside of academia. She also found herself in a lamentable situation where she felt forced to choose this career over motherhood.
Still, her story reminds us that at any point in world history, only the tiniest fraction of Christian women could be academics. The average woman had to figure out a different way of loving God with all her mind.
What I have not seen acknowledged sufficiently to date is this important reality: Women, whether married or not, mothers or not, face a different intellectual scandal than men. Yes, God commands all of us to love ...
