Aimee Byrd

Do Women Have to Go to Seminary to be Discipled?

Aimee Byrd

March 30, 2022

This is a question that’s been haunting me. My writing, publishing, and speaking were born out of both a desire and struggle to learn about discipleship in adulthood. I had some basic questions as a young adult:

If I’m going to take this being a Christian thing seriously, what does that look like?

If Christianity is true, what can I hold fast to when I don’t want to act like one?

And how do I grow into maturity?

In seeking answers to these questions, other women resonated with my curiosity and I was asked to teach a women’s Bible study. Of course, the beautiful answer turns our eyes to knowing and communing with the triune God. In this time, I experienced the thrill of discovering theology, a group of thinking women who ask the hard questions, and our joy in growth together. But this excitement came crashing down when the pastor revealed in a flippant comment that his expectations for our learning were lower than the theological questions we had. After all, we were the women’s Bible study. Keep doing your nice learning over there. Wink.

Where does a thinking woman in the church go to be discipled? Turns out we capped out.

My Trajectory

Aimee Byrd

9 comments

March 15, 2022

There seems to be a lot of concern and “I told you so’s” on social media this week over my trajectory. I find that an interesting word. At first, I was bothered by it as it is being used in the sense that I started off in a good place and now I’m headed to the danger zone. That all along, I’ve been deceiving everyone. I’m the devil in the shape of a woman, trying to take everyone with me on my trajectory.

But as I think about it, I am on a trajectory. That’s why complementarianism, as it’s defined in contemporary evangelicalism, can’t hold me. Women in their spaces can only grow in limited ways.

My trajectory is nothing less than communion with the triune God and all his beloved. My trajectory is the union of heaven and earth, Christ and his bride, behind the veil, joined with all who love the Son, the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband (Rev. 21:11).

Because, typologically speaking, the last man standing is a woman. I think of Christ’s words to his church/bride:

“Your neck is like the tower of David, constructed in layers. A thousand shields are hung on it—all of them shields of warriors.”
Song 4:4

That Was Then, This Is Now

Aimee Byrd

48 comments

March 10, 2022

Colin Smothers wrote a piece for CBMW about me speaking during a church service last week and titled it, That Was Then, This Is Now. He pulled up an article I wrote back in 2013 answering a reader’s question about the difference between a woman preaching and a woman writing a blog post. He must have been doing some serious digging! I should thank him for reading through my archives so intently. But he’s right…

That Was Then

That was the good ol’ days when Aimee played by the complementarian rules. She discovered that they hold the subjugation of women higher than orthodox trinitarianism. She found that they value Danvers over Nicene. They demand that she publicly answer questions made by anonymous men, or lose her job. They misrepresent her work in their “academic” reviews. They turn her out of her own denomination by enabling their leaders to openly revile her, leaving her unprotected and traumatized by the whole process of asking for help.

That was then.

This is Now

Who’s Ready for a Sexual Reformation?

Aimee Byrd

1 comment

March 8, 2022

It is time! The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman is now available! And it doesn’t stop with the book. You can join me, Sheila Gregoire, Mike Bird, Beth Allison Barr, Nijay Gupta, and Tiffany Bluhm for a virtual conversation series and live Q&A on April 19th. You can sign up for that here. This is just the beginning. Here is a little sneak peek into the Introduction, Reformation Moves Forward:

Imagine there is a heaven.

In 1971 John Lennon released what became his bestselling single as a solo artist, “Imagine.” He asked us to imagine a world with no heaven, no borders, and no possessions. This imagining was supposed to help promote peace, as we live only for today and no longer have reasons for war, greed, or hunger. If we could just get rid of the realities of God, land, and our basic needs, we could come together as one. We would love each other.

John Lennon was wrong about that. We aren’t God, and we wouldn’t exist without him. But imagining that we could, we would have no goodness, as all goodness comes from him. The problem is not the gifts he’s given us but the corruption of our own hearts. The solution for peace isn’t imagining no heaven; the solution is setting our eyes on the beautiful truth. The solution is to have an eschatological imagination,[1] to think deeply about our ultimate aim.

Imagine heaven and earth coming together—a new heaven and new earth.

Imagine a triune God who created us to have eternal communion with him and with one another there. Imagine that this God created us as icons, or representative symbols, of himself, showcasing a great love story— the story of the outgoing, overflowing love of the triune God. Maybe it is hard to imagine this kind of love. But give it a try. Imagine that we are created to share covenantally in the Father’s love for the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Imagine that our very bodies tell the story of a gift given in eternity—a gift of a bride to the Son. Imagine man and woman revealing the deep mystery of an eternal trinitarian covenant that is prefigured in creation.

Communion Without Shame

Aimee Byrd

7 comments

March 1, 2022

Photo by Lennart Wittstock on Pexels.com

There are many disillusioned disciples today. Church isn’t what we thought it was. As I’ve said elsewhere, instead of giving the world a beautiful picture of Christ’s bride and a glimpse of our telos in communion with him and one another, we see much ugliness and abuse of power. In multiple denominations. How did we get here? What is church supposed to be? What is our witness to the watching world?

I’m still thinking about this. What does healthy discipleship look like? What happens when love is in the church? Why do many seem so afraid of this? The other day I tweeted “theology without love is dead.” As many resonated with this simple statement, the qualifiers and corrections came rolling out.

Here’s the thing: Christianity is a confessional faith. But as necessary and beneficial as our creeds and confessions are, they can’t give you love. They were never meant to be alone like this. Theology without love is theology without God. And that’s not theology at all. We worship our God in spirit and in truth. We need both. Without love, there is no beauty, no significance, and no place for our longings to land. Theology without love is not only dead; it isn’t safe. And it is driven by shame. Theology without love is shameology.

An Invitation to Care

Aimee Byrd

14 comments

February 3, 2022

“When we read authors who use language different from what we’re used to, we have an opportunity to try to hear what they are intending to say, an opportunity for empathy and what theologians once called the judgement of charity.”

This is what I needed to do. I thought I already was, but reading Greg Johnson’s book, Still Time to Care, has revealed just how much more I need to learn, to listen. I love the handle of this book. It is an invitation to care. Johnson writes as a pastor and as a survivor who is still in the trenches of being vilified. He writes asking for us to hear the experiences of homosexuals, gays, lesbians, queers, same-sex attracted—whatever terminology is meaningful to describe themselves—in the church.

He begins the book with a “Note on Terminology” that I needed to read. I used to be more persuaded that “same-sex attracted” was a more faithful way to describe homosexuality. I thought that “gay” was too identity-driven. I thought that Christians who know that their identity is in Christ should not want to label themselves with a term that connects to a sexual orientation, especially when the temptations that flow from this orientation are not morally neutral. To go a little off script here to something Johnson probably wouldn’t say, I recently was encouraged by an acquaintance when I was saying I should be better at something. She said, “Should is an asshole.”

And so Johnson gave me an opportunity to see a more opened up picture of what is behind all this language. As it turns out, there is a lot of historical baggage around the different terminology on sexual orientation. And different age groups hear them differently due to their experiences. I had a lot to learn. But for starters, Johnson doesn’t insist on a specific terminology. He doesn’t want that to get in the way of the opportunity to try to hear. And so he swaps terminology throughout the book, asking for charity as he is trying to speak for and reach a diversity of people. I want to get passed the terminology wars to the heart of the matter. Anyway, who the heck am I from my position of safety with my sexual orientation to tell those who are not how to describe themselves?

Still Time to Care: An Opportunity to Learn

Aimee Byrd

8 comments

January 31, 2022

The first thing that I want to say about Greg Johnson’s book, Still Time to Care, is that I learned a lot from reading it. That statement has layers of meaning to it. First, I read it. And that is what I’m going to write about today. There is so much posturing and “othering” in regard to those associated with Revoice. Some in the PCA are working to remove Greg from his pastoral office. If you are in any Reformed spaces on social media, you see there is a way that certain Christians want us to think about Greg. (I’m using his first name here to emphasize that Greg is a person.)

By not reading the book, I can distance myself from accusations that have come my way. They go something like this “Byrd is on a trajectory to feminism and the ‘liberal’ theology that is coming out of Revoice.” That would be the friendlier version of what’s going around. I know that any positive mention of Still Time to Care will propel the circulation of I told you so’s. I told you Byrd is dangerous. See?! And attached to this is the misrepresentation that I don’t uphold marriage between one man and one woman or that homosexual romantic partnerships, sex, and marriage is a sin. I do and I do. And so does Greg.

A New Reading of Desire and Rule

Aimee Byrd

29 comments

January 25, 2022

My upcoming book is dedicated to Anna Anderson, as we have done so much thinking, studying, and discussing in awe and wonder over the typology of man and woman that unfolds throughout Scripture. Rather than a natural theology from below, we have come to embrace an anthropology of man and woman that is anchored in eschatology. Anna is currently working on how Revelation 12 helps inform our reading of Genesis 3:16. I asked if she would write out her insights to share for my readers. Here is her guest post:

I am not the only one who has been stumped by Genesis 3:16b, “your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.” If you open the commentaries, you will find all of the following opinions on the subject of the woman’s desire and the man’s rule. If you charted them, it would look something like this:

	Woman’s Desire Good	Woman’s Desire Bad
Man’s Rule Good	Desire Good, Rule Good (Church fathers)¹	Desire Bad, Rule Good (Foh, Ortlund )²
Man’s Rule Bad	Desire Good, Rule Bad (Trible, Powell)³	Desire Bad, Rule Bad (Wenham, Ross, Waltke, Motyer, Knight)⁴

How Did Evil Enter the World?

Aimee Byrd

no comments

January 21, 2022

I was in one of those brain-bending conversations the other day with a few friends about how evil entered the world. Being as we are the created and not the Creator, that our faculties are depraved from sin, and he is Goodness, we cannot fully comprehend such a question. But I did remember reading something years back from Augustine’s City of God that stuck with me. So, I dug it back up and worked through some of his thoughts on it.

How did some of the angelic beings fall? Did they have evil wills to begin with? That would mean that God created something that wasn’t good. How were they corrupted, then?

Augustine defines blessedness as “cleaving to Him who supremely is.” And he defines misery as having “forsaken Him who supremely is, and have turned to themselves who have no such essence.”

So then, “What made the first evil will bad?” Was it first corrupted by another evil will? No, then it wouldn’t be first. Was a good will existing in some evil nature? If not by nature, it couldn’t exist at all. But the answer to this can’t be yes either because an evil will could not survive in an evil nature, evil would vitiate and corrupt the nature. “And therefore the evil will could not exist in an evil nature, but in a nature at once good and mutable, which this vice could injure. For if it did no injury, it was no vice; and consequently the will in which it was, could not be called evil. But if it did injury, it did it by taking away or diminishing good.” Therefore, he concludes that an evil will cannot be from eternity. I know, this is a bit mind-bending, hang on.

You’re Only Human

Aimee Byrd

9 comments

January 3, 2022

“All of us bounce between the illusion that we are in control and the world’s demonstration that we are not.”

This sounds like bad news. But Kelly Kapic wants us to understand that our finitude is actually good news in his book, You’re Only Human. He was led to reflect and write about human finitude as he realized just how under-developed our doctrine of creation is. We seem to conflate finitude with sin, rather than seeing it as a creaturely gift. Finitude is not sin. It means that we are not God. Kapic speaks of finitude as “good, created human limits….that are part of God’s original act of making us, which he called ‘good.’” Too often, we want to reject and transcend these limits. We easily fall into the temptation that the serpent deceived Eve with, and that Adam willing participated in—“rejecting love to gain power.” He later builds on Augustine’s work saying, “It is not our creaturely limits that make us sinful, but rather the absence or deformation of love.”

Instead of a full review, I want to recommend this book and reflect a bit on Kapic’s chapter on humility. But first, I want to note something he says about our salvation. I believe that the church today needs this recalibration, which is a grounding in God’s goodness and love which overflows in creation. It’s life-giving water to the parched, transactional focus that is so prevalent in our thinking and teaching. And so he says: