Lately my theological timeline has started to feel more and more like a UFC fight card. (Is that even possible?)
In one corner: Preston Sprinkle, fresh off his new book From Genesis to Junia, making the case that women should have equal opportunity to serve in all leadership offices of the church. In the other corner: a growing lineup of complementarian scholars, pastors, bloggers, and Twitter-ers (is that a thing?) sharpening their keyboards.
Quote tweets. Dunk threads. Sides forming in real time. Lines getting drawn. Everyone deciding who’s faithful and who’s the heretic of the week.
I have not read the book yet (I look forward to it, though.) But I have been sitting in the bleachers on Twitter with a bag of popcorn watching, reading the articles, responses, and jabs fly back and forth like a Dana White–promoted main event. Honestly, it’s not a bad idea, Dana. Get Preston and Tom Schreiner in a ring together. Have Joe Rogan commentate. We could even invite James Talarico and Paula White as the undercard. The pay-per-view numbers would be historic.
I say all of this with genuine affection for Preston. I’m a fan. I love his thoughtfulness, his commitment to Scripture, his willingness to wade into territory most theologians keep at arm’s length. And I have deep respect for the scholars pushing back. These are not necessarily bad-faith actors on either side. These are people who love Jesus, take the Bible seriously, and have landed in genuinely different places.
Also—and I say this without cynicism—Preston and his publishers are not dummies. They know the game. The only thing that sells better than sex in Christian publishing is polarized anger. Want to start a fire? Tell the church that women should lead. People lose their effing minds.
But I’m not actually interested in shutting this conversation down. I don’t think they should stop. (Not just for the entertainment value, either.)
This conversation is worth having. Preston is right when he says this is a justice issue. These aren’t just theological abstractions living in academic nerd-land. They land in real churches, on real women, with real consequences. A theology of limitation shapes who gets to lead, who gets to speak, who gets to be seen as bearing the full image of God in their gifting. That matters. The stakes are not imaginary.
So I’m not here to call for a ceasefire on the argument itself. I do have concerns about where we’re having it.
I got a theological education thinking I was going to get clarity. I was going to learn Greek and Hebrew, go deep into the text, and finally figure out what the Bible really says on the hard questions. I was going to come out the other side with a tidy set of convictions and the exegetical receipts to back them up.
Not so much.
The deeper I went into the languages, the arguments, the interpretive traditions—the more complicated everything became.
Brilliant scholars. Deeply faithful people. All staring at the same text and landing in genuinely different places.
It was unsettling at first.
In the end, I left with stronger convictions about Jesus. And far less confidence that my tribe had perfectly solved every other question. I don’t know if that’s humility. Maybe it’s maturity. Maybe I was just tired. Probably all three.
Someone told me a joke recently. A man dies and gets to heaven, and St. Peter offers him a tour. As they walk, Peter points out the different neighborhoods.
“Over there are the Baptists.”
“Catholics are on that hill.”
“Non-denoms are in the back—great worship team.”
They keep walking, and at a certain point Peter slows down and lowers his voice to a whisper.
“That’s the Church of Christ section over there.”
The man looks confused.
“Why are we whispering?”
Peter glances over.
“Because they think they’re the only ones here.”
It’s funny because it’s a little true. (P.S. Before you freak out on me, it was a COC person who told that joke!) It’s also a mirror. Because every tribe tends to do this, at least subconsciously.
We are the ones who really take Scripture seriously.
We are the ones reading it correctly.
We are the ones who, if everyone would just come around to our interpretive framework, would finally get the church back on track.
Certainty stops being a position and becomes identity—a way of sorting who’s faithful and who’s compromised.
It gives us an excuse to pass out Jr. Holy Spirit badges and start acting as the hall monitors for Jesus’ church. But when certainty becomes identity, it stops being about truth and starts being about tribe.
I live in Murphy, TX, a suburb of the Dallas metroplex established in the 1800s. Two of the first organizations in this town were First Baptist Church of Murphy and the nearby Corinth Presbyterian Church.
As the story goes, in the early 1900s it was common for congregations in small rural towns like Murphy to attend each other’s revivals and series of meetings, especially in the summer. These were day-long gatherings. Shared meals. Open Bibles and robust “conversations.”
First Baptist and Corinth Presbyterian did not share the same theology. They had real differences—on baptism, on polity, on the finer points of Reformed doctrine. These were not minor disagreements. And they sat down together anyway.
They passed the potato salad.
They opened the Bible.
They argued.
They prayed.
They went home and worshiped in their own traditions the following Sunday. The disagreement didn’t disappear. But neither did the relationship.
It’s hard to demonize someone who makes a kick-ass potato salad.
The internet doesn’t create our disagreements (except for the Russian and Chinese bots). But it does dramatically change the conditions under which we have them. Christians have always disagreed—violently, creatively, exhaustingly. But today’s primary means of “discourse” removes embodiment from the argument.
Online you are not arguing with a person. You are arguing with a position attached to an avatar.
And when it’s not a person but a position, cruelty gets easier, certainty gets louder, and humility becomes genuinely rare.
You say things in a quote tweet that you would never say across a table.
You dismiss someone’s entire theological framework in 280 characters without ever having to account for the impact.
You can keep score, build an audience, perform your convictions—and call it faithfulness.
But nobody is bringing potato salad.
I want to be fair here. Preston has always offered to host opposing voices on his podcast for actual conversation. I genuinely hope some of the people responding to this book take him up on that. There is something different about talking with someone versus talking at them.
Something changes when you have to look at a human being and make your argument. Something gets harder. And harder is good for us.
Paul writes to the church in Ephesus:
Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. (Ephesians 4:3)
That word matters. Unity in Christ is not something the church manufactures through perfect agreement or flawless theology. It already exists because we belong to the same Lord. Our task is not to create unity but to hold onto it—to guard it, to fight for it, to prioritize it even while we argue about difficult things. The real question is not whether unity is possible. In Christ it already is. The question is whether we will protect that unity in the way we speak to one another, or slowly tear it apart one dunk thread at a time.
The early churches in Murphy gathered around tables before anyone had a Twitter account. They figured out how to hold conviction and communion together at the same time. Not perfectly. But together.
Maybe the church doesn’t need fewer hard conversations. Maybe we just need better rooms for them. Rooms with food. Patience. A smidge of grace Sprinkled in (see what I did there?)
So here’s the question I have:
Is there someone on the other side of this debate—whatever debate it is for you—that you could actually sit down with?
Not to win it. But to have it. Over a meal. With some humility. Acknowledging that the unity we’ve been given in Christ is worth more than the argument we’re trying to win.
The popcorn is entertaining. But the potato salad might actually be better for the church.
Give me your thoughts here in the comments (yes, I see the irony of that statement).