Mike Winger's Complementarianism: A Critical Response Overview

Mike Winger's complementarian views on women in ministry are challenged by Bartlett and Williams' detailed refutation.

Mike Winger is a very popular American pastor, theologian, or someone who speaks to Christians on the internet about many matters. One area where Mike Winger has written a lot is on the case for a complementarian reading of the Bible, and he's written

and recorded quite a lot on this topic. So much so that two friends of mine, Andrew Bartlett and Taran Williams, went out of their way to produce a very elaborate, lengthy, and sustained engagement with the work of Mike Winger on this topic. The reason

they're doing this is because Mike Winger's videos get a lot of views, a lot of traction, and by the metrics of social media, are getting a lot of attention. So they've gone out of their way to produce this excellent website responding, pretty much point by point, to Mike Winger's

key assertions. So what I do in this video is I interview Andrew and Taran, and we engage the work of Mike Winger. Now we don't go through everything, but we do a few summary things. We cover the, you know, whether there were women apostles,

like Junia. Uh, we talk also about submission: Does Paul command men to have authority and to rule over their wives? We talk about that famous passage in 1 Timothy 2, uh, you know, and all the things it says there about what women can and can't do and the meaning of the Greek verbs.

And we also talk about, you know, what's practically at stake; what is really the difference? What's the, what's the, what are the consequences if you hold to one view and not another? So that's what I talked about with Andrew and

Taran, so if you're interested in gender issues and the debate about ministry authority and the Bible—and what it says women can and can't do in church ministry—then you will love this conversation with Taran and Andrew. Hello everyone, I'm Mike Bird.

I'm joined here with Andrew Bartlett and with Taran Williams to engage in this discussion on the work of Michael Winger about egalitarianism and complementarianism and a reading of scripture. But first of all, can we find out from you two chaps, um, who you are and

uh, how did you wind up working together? Do you want to go first, Taran?

All right, I'll go first. I'm Andrew Bartlett. I'm in the UK. Um, in my day job, I do international arbitration, but I also wrote this book and um, got involved

in this discussion, trying to look at it from the point of view of taking a non-partisan view and seeing where the arguments and evidence ended up. And then um, I discovered Taran through reading something he'd written, which he'll probably like to tell you about.

What's your day job, Andrew? International arbitration. So Andrew got hold of me after I'd released my book, *How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy*, and um, he was the first actually to tell me, 'Hey, have you responded to Mike Winger,

This video, and I've got friends all over the world who are having the same experience of... So then that leads to the question, who is Michael Winger? Yeah, so Michael Winger is a... is a very successful YouTube Bible teacher. He lives in California. He's got

um, close to 34 million subscribers. Really. And um, and he's a very likable guy. He's known to do a lot of research, does long videos that create the sense that he's thoroughly researched the matter. And the reason

that we've connected with him is he did a 43-hour-long series, over 13 videos, in which he claims to deal with every pertinent text in the Bible on women in ministry. And he feels it's a slam dunk for complementarianism. And although he

starts off quite open-minded, he, in his final video, he's calling egalitarians to repent. Okay, so he kind of starts off all nice, polite, and personable, but then kind of drops the hammer a bit. Okay, well, that's fair enough. I I've

seen some of his videos. I've seen some of his videos; some are a little bit more persuasive or more convincing than others, or maybe varying degrees of *less* convincing might be a better way of putting it. But yeah, I have seen a lot of

people on the internet quoting him, citing him. He does have quite a big internet following around the world from people who like his stuff. And he has done this massive, uber-mega series about complementarianism, trying to go through everything about men and women in the Bible, and he really does try to

sell his view as a Biblical one, and this is where your own work... you've got your own webpage up where you kind of go through, in 13 parts, fairly systematically, your own response to Mike Winger's perspectives about men,

women, and the Bible and ministry. And you're coming to it advocating an egalitarian position in the end, but I think, for at least for you, Taran, that's not where you actually started out in life, did you?

So, for 20 years I was in the leadership team of a quite substantial church in Cape Town, South Africa, and um, I was usually the person who would explain to people joining the church why we excluded women from the eldership team, and I usually did it winsomely.

My chief point was that we take our cues from scripture, not from culture. Um, near the end of my tenure in this church, several trusted leaders raised the point that we didn't have a really good position paper defending our exclusion of women from leadership. We were also very soft complementarian, and

they thought we were actually inconsistent; which way was it—was it complementarianism or was it egalitarianism? In a sense, we were becoming functionally egalitarian. So, as part of a team of people to re-explore the matter, we set out to write a

persuasion paper, why complementarianism was the way to go. But in my research, um, I decided to really read widely and try and get it from the other perspective. What I didn't expect is to be persuaded by scholars on the other side. I thought that they

had a better exegesis on key passages and also better synthesis of the Bible's whole teaching on the matter, so I changed my mind. Yeah, well, same thing for me. My story is not identical, but I kind of started off with a being a

complementarian, and you know, after, for me, getting into the Bible, parts of the Bible like Romans 16, it just became far more persuasive. And then I found more and more of the Bible actually made sense, um, by doing that rather than me having to force a, you know, square peg

into a round hole or something like that. What about Andrew? Do you have a, do you have a similar experience? Did you have a, did you have a great epiphany along this line at some point? Well, when I wrote my book, I was in a complementarian

church, and um, somebody said to me, uh, "Isn't there something less partisan written on this?" Because they'd been looking at things written which tend to be very partisan. Yeah, so I thought, well, my day job is to look at both sides fairly, see where the arguments, yeah, see

where the evidence leads. So I, I, I did that, and um, from the point of view of my church affiliation, I came out in the end on the wrong side. So, um, happens to the best of us. Um, if I had to make my number one criticism of

uh, Mike Winger, it would be that he doesn't realize how much his own culture and situation affects him. And I heard someone once say that complementarianism is very much a post-World War II suburban consumerist religious phenomenon. Okay, so the idea that, you know,

Dad goes to work and the mom stays at home. That assumes a certain economic situation. When people say things like, "You know, you should consider hiring a nanny so you can work on your marriage," that assumes a certain economic situation that is simply not true pretty

much everywhere else in the world that I've seen, and certainly, certainly for me and my students, what is sold as being biblical very much amounts to a reflection of their own situatedness, which is then given a loose biblical justification; or else they view the

Bible through the lens of their own experience and their own context, and they cannot believe that people can read the Bible any other way. So I mean, that's my biggest critique of Mike Winger; it's I think I think some

versions of complementarianism are very much a result—they're born of their own context—but there are other areas, you know, we we we could take them through; we could go through the whole 13 points that you've raised, and I do

recommend people go through them in depth to learn what you say. Uh, there are a few key highlights, though. Uh, you talk about women as apostles, responding to Mike Winger on this, if I remember from what I saw. Uh,

Winger is happy to say that Junia was probably a woman; he's got a little bit of an ambulance—'Well, she was probably a woman, but she wasn't an apostle.' And this is where we're talking about a reading of Romans 16 here. Uh,

Where there's, you know, Junia and Andronicus, who are either outstanding among or well known to the apostles—people translate it differently. Uh, do either of you want to speak to that? Do you want to do it? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So, um, so I think you summarized the

issue there. Um, it's really the ESV and the NIV, and the NET translations of the Bible that have popularized this idea that Andronicus and Junia were well known to the apostles. The historic reading has been that they were well-known among

the apostles; in other words, inclusive. There's this group, the apostles, whoever Paul is referring to there, and Andronicus and Junia are part of that group.  It's actually been decades of back-and-forth scholarship on whether Junia was a woman or a male. I think the consensus

which, um, Mike Winger agrees with, is that she was female. Um, Kevin DeYoung and, um, Al Mohler still hold a minority view on that. I think we can say that they are probably wrong on that particular point. Uh, we have no historical Latin use of

the male name, but we've got hundreds of examples of the female name. Um, and then the question is, are they—was she—how do we know which translation… The ESV is really based on two idiosyncratic scholarly papers that

were released by Michael Bird. Daniel Wallace joined him in the first one in 2001, arguing that the KJV translation is, um, 'well known to the apostles.' And then there was considerable pushback from Richard Bauckham,  Elen K.  Pagels, and Linda Belleville. And I think, uh, it

maintained the majority view that, actually, uh, we can almost be sure that the Greek native speakers, all of the church fathers that commented on Romans 16:7, were sure that Junia was an apostle. They usually marveled at the fact John Chrysostom thought it was, you know,

an amazing woman. She was listed among the apostles, and I mean, he—I think he knew Greek pretty well. Yes, absolutely. Um, so then the counterargument is, is Mike Bird actually does something. He says, probably Mike Bird is right, and he points to this 2015 paper and he says,

he's done research; there's no pushback on it. I don't think he did his research sufficiently because in 2020, Dr. Lynn, a Yale New Testament professor, wrote in the JETS a response to Bird's paper. Um, but he's got this interesting angle to

end. So even if she was an apostle, uh, probably she wasn't an authoritative apostle. And uh, some of the work that Andrew and I did in our paper is we studied the New Testament; we noticed that there are three kinds of apostles

in the New Testament. There are delegated carriers, like the ones mentioned in Philippians 2; 2 Corinthians 8 is basically where money carriers sent by churches taking money to apostles in need or other churches. Then you've got the 12

apostles, which are the primary apostles. But then the third category is the—is the—these kind of pioneering apostles. Paul is an interesting breed because he—he's almost like one of the primary apostles, but you think about Barnabas and Silas; these are the

Apostles that are doing groundbreaking, high-cost work—uh, you know, establishing churches where they go, probably ordaining leadership. The question is, which of these apostles would Junia be amongst? I think we can—no commentator argues that she was a delegated courier.

If she was, she probably wouldn't have got arrested. Paul says as much in Romans 16:7. Yeah, nobody's arguing that she was one of the twelve apostles. Barnabas and Silas weren't, which leaves just one more category of possibility: that she was

doing this groundbreaking work. Um, Paul says that they were in prison, that he treats them as people being in the faith even longer than him, and he gives them this high—highest endorsement. So probably they were doing the kind of work that Barnabas and Silas were

doing. Okay, well, that that makes a lot of sense that, you know, Junia was one of these pioneering apostles.  So, for me, it makes sense of the context of Romans 16. I think that's a good answer to Mike Winger. Um, to get to something else and

maybe Andrew, you want to chime in on this one? Uh, the idea of male headship and female submission—um, some of some, you know, people watching this may know that famous diagram, like with the umbrella, and you've got God the Father, God the Son, the husband,

the wife, and then like children at the very bottom, if it's a hierarchy—a kind of pyramid of divine and human power—which I know is very uh popular in some circles. Uh, what does Singer say about women and wives submitting, and why is he

Well, Mike Winger is very keen on this idea of authority. Yeah, I bet he really goes for it in a big way in his videos, and he is very keen that husbands should exercise authority over their wives. He says husbands are the higher

authority in the marriage, and he says they should take the decisions. This is really important, and he goes at it in a rather backwards way because he first of all tries to work out what Paul's 'head' metaphor means by looking at other people's use of the

word 'head' in different contexts, instead of first looking at Paul's train of thought and how he uses it. So he proceeds backwards; he looks at other things, and metaphors can be used in lots of different ways. He concludes, from looking at other things

and on bad reasoning, that 'head' must mean 'person in charge,' and then he plugs that into the passages and tries to make the passages fit with that particular interpretation. We've shown in detail in our articles why that just doesn't work. There's a sort of basic

question that he just never answers, and we raised it with him a number of times: If he's right that God wants husbands to exercise authority over their wives or to lead them, why is there nowhere in scripture which says a husband ought to

do that? There's nowhere from Genesis to Revelation that says a husband ought to exercise authority over his wife or he ought to lead his wife. I mean, that's pretty fundamental, and Mike can't possibly think it's because husbands don't need

To be told, Mike clearly thinks husbands do need to be told, so he never addresses that question. You I mean, for example, Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage. Why does Paul not say that a husband ought to exercise authority, or ought to take the decisions, or

ought to take a lead? 1 Corinthians 7, why doesn't Paul say any of those things? What he says is the opposite in 1 Corinthians 7. Yeah, 1 Corinthians 7, he expressly says decisions about the important matters of sexual intercourse,

together, joint prayer, they should be taken by mutual consent. Why would it be different for anything else? Yeah, and Paul expressly describes the husband's and wife's authority over the one flesh, which is the two of them, in exactly the same words. It it and just Mike just well, it's

just frustrating because Mike just doesn't deal with the points. When he comes to 1 Corinthians 7, in his many hours of videos, he spends 30 seconds on an egalitarian view of 1 Corinthians 7. He just doesn't grapple with it, and I think

people need to understand we're not criticizing Mike's character. He he's a really sincere guy. He's really tried hard. He's he's well-motivated, he's well-intentioned, he's a sincere brother, and his presentation skills are absolutely brilliant, which is why so many people

watch his videos or listen to them for long periods when they're doing the ironing or driving or whatever. But but he just doesn't have the the background skills and and and the learning of how to reason and deal with a partisan issue, and it's be, you know, it's become a

It's a very complicated issue because, you know, once the Church decided women were not inferior, everyone's had to look again at all the texts. Yeah, because they were previously interpreted on the basis of, well, we know women are inferior, so obviously they can't be leaders anywhere—whether it's Church, home, or society, or anything.

So there's a lot of work been done, and there's a lot of things up in the air, and a lot of things that need to be worked through. But despite all his sincerity and despite all the hours he's

spent on it, he just doesn't perceive the arguments on the other side. He keeps misreading what scholars say, and we've documented that over and over again in our articles. He attributes to them crazy ideas that they certainly don't mean, and you can see they don't mean.

Sometimes he says their view is the opposite of what it really is. Um, so if husbands are in charge and should take the important decisions, why does Paul say what he says? It doesn't make any sense. He ought to be saying, "This is important: husbands should lead their wives." He doesn't say that husbands should exercise authority over their wives. He doesn't say that husbands should be in charge. He doesn't say that.

Yeah, it sounds like, um, Mike Wing has got a very selective attention to detail and doesn't pay attention to the

details when they don't quite fit his case. So I mean, that's one thing. Yeah, I mean, 1 Corinthians 7 is very interesting, particularly the way he says that the body does not belong to the husband but to the wife, and the wife's

body not to her, but to that's that's clear mutuality. He doesn't say 'and the husband is the boss of all the bodies' or anything like that, and he doesn't also deal, as far as I remember, with the problem of the abuses of this, of how it can in fact

perhaps, you know, inadvertently lead to sponsoring, um, things like domestic violence and all sorts of abuse. And what what I tend to say is, 'Look, complementarianism isn't being an abusive person or a sponsor of abuse, but complementarianism is definitely an enabling condition for

certain views, uh, that lead to abusive marriages and abusive conditions for a family. So it's not a necessary condition, but it certainly is an amplifying, uh, condition. And numerous sociological studies have shown that. The work of Steve Tracy in the US and you've

got Julia B and many others, um, and Haley Gleon have said much the same thing in AAL. So that that's what concerns me is, you know, once you start talking about male authority, it can also be taken in a in a very bad direction, uh, and

complementarians have—the ones I know are aware of this—but I think they haven't done enough to, uh, prevent that. Uh, I know I mean I know several who, you know, you know, are modified by the idea that their theology would lead to some sort

of domestic violence. But the tragic fact is, is an enabling—this idea of authority in marriage can be an enabling condition for domestic violence. Uh, let's go on to that. Um, Mike Winger, in another video, does try to address the issue and distances himself from the possibility that his

Teaching would result in abuse of male leadership. I agree that he doesn't do enough, but he does try to speak to it. Just so you know, okay, that's good. Don't think I got to that video; um, we should get to the main event, which is

1 Timothy 2, and this is this is very much the John 3:16 of complementarianism: that I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority. Uh, and of course, a lot of it rides on the meaning of this verb, *authentein*. Is it a neutral word for

having authority, or does it mean to domineer or to exercise authority in a negative fashion? What is the context of this saying? Is it something specific to the Ephesian context when Paul's writing to Timothy, or is it universal because Paul roots it in creation,

you know, "for Adam was formed first"? Is it rooted in the order of creation, or is it based on something to do with the influence of the pernicious Artemis cult that uh was going on in Ephesus, which some of the women there were holding

to? So, so what's Mike Winger doing with 1 Timothy 2? I imagine he's doing probably quite a lot, and what's your response to it? Yeah, nearly a quarter of his series is on that because his video on 1 Timothy 2 is 11

and a half hours long. So he understands that this is really important, and it's had a lot of views. And well done him; I mean, he he he does manage to talk in a way that's really very attractive, and he gives the impression that he's looked

fairly at both sides of the argument, and he really believes it. He really believes that that's what he's done because he's just not aware of how he misses things because he just hasn't got the background and the knowledge that he needs. And he just, even though he spent

11 and a half hours on it, he doesn't answer basic questions that need to be answered in order to understand this passage correctly. So we're talking about 1 Timothy 2:12 where Paul uses this very rare verb, *aente*, and he needs to ask himself, 'Why does

Paul use that very rare word? There must be some special reason.' You know, if you're a good communicator, you don't use some baffling, unusual word unless you have a special reason to know that word will be understood by your audience and will ring a bell with them and will

make your message more, um, powerful for them. And Mike simply never—he never talks about it at all. He never addresses the question. There are... Mike thinks the word is used to refer to the ordinary authority function of an elder, but why wouldn't Paul use one of the

ordinary words that's used for that? He why skip over all those words and use instead this really rare word? And the only answer that we've been able to find is it's a word used in astrology, and astrology was probably an issue for the church in Ephesus because of

Artemis's connection with astrology. So, but Mike doesn't consider any of that because he doesn't even ask the question. And then, so his big point is that translations that translate as 'exercise authority' or 'have authority' are correct, and that Paul—what Paul's

Doing so is prohibiting all women from exercising the authority function and the teaching function of a church elder. But if we go back and look at examples of the use of this rare word—examples that are relevant to Paul's time, not examples from centuries later, but

examples from Paul's time—the two most relevant examples we have: in one case, it refers to strong-arm negotiating tactics to overpower another party in a negotiation and force them to back down; and in the other case, it's used of astrological influence,

where a powerful planet dominates or overmasters other heavenly bodies. That's not a good word for what an elder *should* do; it's what someone *shouldn't* do. And in fact, Mike makes a big point about how this rare word is translated into Latin in the early Latin versions,

especially the Vulgate. It's translated with the Latin word *dominari*. Mike looks at some complementarian book which lists a lot of uses of *dominari*, all of which are irrelevant, and says, 'Oh, look, therefore it's all

confirmed that this is a positive word about elders' function.' But there's one use of *dominari* in the Vulgate which is actually about the elders' function, and it's in 1 Peter chapter 5:3. There, Peter is translated in the Vulgate as saying this is what an elder

shouldn't do. It's the exact opposite of Mike's view, and yet he has hundreds of thousands of people listening to him and thinking he's done his research properly. It's just frustrating, and he doesn't even realize that he hasn't done his research.

properly because he hasn't engaged with our articles, even though he issued invitations. He said, "Look, if I've got anything wrong, give me pushback." And we've given him lots of pushback, but he's never engaged, unfortunately. And then there's this

creation principle thing that you mentioned. You know, he's so confident that verses 13 and 14 are appealing to a creation principle about men's authority over women, rather than giving an Old Testament illustration. But in his 11 and a half hours, Mike

never tells us how he knows this is a creation principle rather than an illustration. And his creation principle reading has two fatal defects. One is he can't make sense of verse 14 as a creation principle. Traditionally, it was understood as a creation principle on

the basis that women are inferior to men, easily deceived. So that's an obvious creation principle; everybody knows women are inferior. That was the traditional view; that's what Chris Ausam said. But um, Mike rightly rejects that view, as as nearly everyone else does now. He says,

Mike Winger is Wrong on Women and the Church

Early Christian History with Michael Bird

Introduction: Mike Winger's work on complementarianism and a response by Andrew Bartlett and Taran Williams

Mike Winger, a popular American pastor/theologian, has written extensively on complementarianism.

Andrew Bartlett and Taran Williams created a detailed response to Winger's work due to its significant online influence.

The response addresses Winger's key assertions point by point.

The interview covers topics like women apostles (Junia), submission in marriage, and 1 Timothy 2.

The discussion also explores the practical implications of different viewpoints.

Background of Andrew Bartlett and Taran Williams

Andrew Bartlett, based in the UK, works in international arbitration and wrote a book on the topic.

Taran Williams, author of *How God Sees Women*, was contacted by Andrew after releasing his book.

Mike Winger is a successful YouTube Bible teacher with millions of subscribers.

Winger's 43-hour series on women in ministry argues for complementarianism.

Taran Williams' journey from complementarian to egalitarian perspective is discussed.

Discussion of Key Arguments and Responses

Analysis of the debate regarding Junia as an apostle in Romans 16.

Examination of Mike Winger's views on male headship and female submission in marriage.

Interpretation of 1 Timothy 2 and the meaning of the word *authentein*.

Discussion of the practical implications and potential negative consequences of complementarianism.

Missiological and Practical Considerations

The impact of complementarian views on the global church, particularly in contexts like China and Iran.

A call for ongoing dialogue and understanding between different perspectives.

Summary of Mike Winger's correct and incorrect points.

Reference to a comprehensive response to Winger's work.

Taran Williams' perspective on Winger's failure to engage with their critique.

Concluding thoughts on the importance of the discussion and the value of the respondents' work.