By the early nineties advancement of the feminist theory had proposed a complete rejection of Judeo-Christian male-female roles, relationships, social structures, and concepts of God. The shifting and redefinition of responsibilities of once defined roles contributed to skewed and distorted ideas of biblical male-female roles. Consequently, in some fashion, all men and women today are by-products of the feminist movement. These influences unwittingly helped define and mold our church, work, and home culture, often times taking precedence over predestined biblical roles. According to Mary A Kassian in her book, The Feminist Mistake, feminism proposed that women find happiness and meaning through the pursuit of personal authority, autonomy, and freedom. Occurring roughly during a 30-year period from 1960 to 1990, a philosophical redistribution of roles in society, home, and church had taken place in regards to the role of the woman. 1
Seemingly harmless, these subtle, but radical role shifts were negatively affecting not only the purpose and structure of the family unit and gender relationship roles, but they were infiltrating and shifting the philosophical deity of the Judeo-Christian Religion. In the late 1960’s, the word patriarchy was coined by Kate Millett to define the male’s responsibility for the oppressions and discontent of women.
Patriarchy is the power of the fathers: a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men – by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor – determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is every where subsumed under the male.2
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1 Mary A. Kassian,The Feminist Mistake (Wheaton: Good News Publisher, 2005), 7-9. 2 Ibid., 27.
Principles of Interpretation Feminism Redefined
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