No matter where we live on the globe today, our social and cultural world has been transformed beyond recognition in the last fifty years. In most spheres women compete with equal efforts and competence if not always with equal rewards. In some areas, in fact, they excel in ways men have never been able to do. The relationship between women and men are now far more complex in so many ways. In such a world, how are men and women to relate to one another. How are Christians to understand the teachings in the Bible, and in particular the Old Testament and Paul's letters, about the distinctions between men and women? What does it mean to be men? Or women? Are we created equal? If so, of what does this equality consists? Does this equality obliterate role distinctions as well, or are they of a different thing altogether?
These are important issues, with implications that run right across of the floor of all our Christian institutions, including our families and church government.
Two main schools of thoughts have emerged within the debate as it has taken place among evangelicals in the Western world (especially North America): the complementarian and the egalitarian. So intense indeed has been the debate that they have felt it needful to formulate and to publish respective declarations on the matter. The first, the Denver Statement, was prepared by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), a gathering of evangelical pastors, professors, and lay people, formed in 1987. The Danvers Statement, first made public in November 1988 and then published as a paid advertisement in Christianity Today, January 13, 1989, takes what its advocates call a complementarian view, that is, that it is men who are called to provide leadership and to exercise authority in the church. Latter that year a group known as Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) unveiled their egalitarian views in a paper entitled �Men, Women and Biblical Equality,� which was subsequently published as a paid advertisement in Christianity Today, April 9, 1990.
The essentials of the complementarian school, as asserted in the Denver Statement, is that men and women are created equal before God but are created for different but complementary roles. Adam's headship in marriage was established by God before the Fall, and was not a result of sin. Egalitarians deny that there is such a distinction or that there existed between Adam and Eve any hierachy that would provide the basis for giving men authority over women. "Male domination" and "female submission" are, according to egalitarians, the result of the Fall and from which we have been redeemed by Christ. It should be pointed out here that both schools are committed to the inspiration and authority of Scriptures; the difference between them is not one of 'believing faithfuls' versus 'unbelieving liberals', but of interpretation.
We are in the process of putting together an entry that will survey the present state of the discussion. Meanwhile we hope you will find the following sourced articles helpful.
Stanley J. Grenz, "Theological Foundations for Male-Female Relationships," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 41/4 (Dec 1998): 615-630.
Harold W. Hoehner, "Can a Woman be a Pastor-Teacher?" Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50/4 (Dec 2007): 761-71.
"JBMW Responds to Discovering Biblical Equality (IVP, 2004)," Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Spring 2005. 
A. C. Perriman, "What Eve Did, What Women Shouldn't Do: The Meaning of Auquentew in 1 Timothy 2:12," Tyndale Bulletin 44/1 (1993): 129-142. 
©Alberith, 2016