This book has 21 autobiographical accounts of well-known American evangelicals – ethnically diverse men and women from a broad range of denominational backgrounds. Contributors include Stuart and Jill Briscoe, Tony Campolo, Bill and Lynne Hybels, I. Howard Marshall, John and Nancy Ortberg and Cornelius Platinga.

The accounts tend to be autobiographical rather than doctrinal. You won’t find a carefully reasoned doctrinal outline for the position in any one account, but you can assemble one across the total. The book has a bibliographic primer at the back for those wishing to conduct more research and it also contains the statement of faith of Christians for Biblical Equality.

John G. Stackhouse Jr, writing of his own experience, notes that the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn is often cited to help us understand how people undergo significant changes in their thinking – what we call paradigm shifts. Kuhn suggests that that we give up our way of thinking, our paradigms, only under duress. Typically we do so when we can no longer accommodate within our paradigms those evidences and arguments that don’t fit – what Khan called anomalies.

Stackhouse recounts how the arguments he encountered in writing and the examples he encountered in the flesh constituted a big and ever-growing pile of anomalies. The collective force of these egalitarian evidences helped collapse his inherited patriarchy. This pattern is common to most of the contributors.

Alan Johnson (editor)
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2010
ISBN 978-0-310-29315

– David McLeod-Jones