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Title: What Is the Difference?: Manhood and Womanhood Defined According to the Bible by John Piper, Elisabeth Elliot ISBN: 1581342918 Publisher: Crossway Books Pub. Date: August, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67
Rating: 5
Summary: Great Biblically based review of Truth
Comment: Piper manages to minimally flesh out the roles described in the Bible for man and woman, while remaining sensitive to the common "modern feminist" views without tiptoeing around the faults in that line of thought. Overall, a great summary of insightful redaction of scripture. Now I want to get the more complete book that Piper edited on this same subject.
Rating: 2
Summary: Misses the point of the Fall
Comment: Like most of today's "complementarians," John Piper has a lot of good things to say. Men should be devoted to the welfare of their wives. They should be spiritual leaders in the home. Women should honor their husband's attempts to provide for them.
That said, Piper misses the mark. He teaches that God designed creation so that Man was the ultimate authority, and that woman's created duty is merely to obey. As much as Piper tries to nuance this view with talk of husbands being "loving," the end result is that the husband still has the final say and the right to break his wife's will if they reach loggerheads.
The correct Biblical view is this: women are in an inferior position to men because our Fall from the Garden has cursed the world. The initial harmony between men and women has been ruined. Genesis teaches that there was no formal "hierarchy" between men and women before the Fall - all of the "complementarians" ingenius attempts to smuggle a master/servent dynamic into the pre-Fall relationship have fallen flat because their assumptions simply aren't apparent in the text. Therefore, man's rule over woman is part of a broken, cursed existence, just like the fact that there are masters and slaves. A Christian man is not to embrace and rejoice in his role as "leader." His job is to raise his wife up to a level of equal worth and personhood to himself, despite his culture's insistence that women are just jiggly sex toys. The complementarian model is flawed because it teaches men to relish their role as "head," and sees the main problem with gender relationships being women getting out of line.
Rating: 4
Summary: Marriage defined by the Maker for the Modern age!
Comment: John Piper delivers a carefully studied Biblical portrait of what it means to be a man or a woman. The principles are based on sound Biblical exegesis, but without a lot of technicality and detail. The chapters dealing with "The Meaning of Masculinity" and "The Meaning of Femininity" are dealt with by the use of carefully constructed definitions that are unfolded word-by-word. Extensive space is given to describing the masculine role of leadership. Piper's approach is Scriptural, and therefore relevant; and he labors hard to bridge any apparant gaps between the Biblical model and its contemporary relevance. He avoids hard and fast rules for specific circumstances, and sticks to sold principles which should govern male-female relationships of differing levels. This would be an excellent book for pastoral premarital counselling.
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