It’s nice of her to finally come out and say it. Despite enduring abuse for years by critics for saying we were too hard on Beth Moore – that we were ascribing false beliefs to her when we kept on insisting she is an egalitarian who believes women ought to preach – and that we were slanderers for questioning her commitment to this biblical doctrine – the “VexUs from Texas” took to Twitter to announce that she does not consider different beliefs on women preaching to be an issue of biblical inerrancy and authority any longer, called complementarianism a “doctrine of man,” and apologized for elevating it to the position she had, begging for forgiveness.
This is not a surprise for us, as we have been calling our shots and documenting this since the beginning. For years she has been making comments on social media congratulating other women when she hears they are preaching, encouraging them to pursue the pulpit, and informing them that she’ll pray they deliver a holy-spirit empowered sermon. This is the most blatant and clearest comment yet on where her mind is with this, though even now she continues to pull her punches.
In a follow-up interview with RNS, Moore continued to hedge her bets for Russell Moore and men like him, giving them plausible deniability and a pathway to defend her by saying, to the question of whether she was egalitarian or complementarianism:
I’m not going to be pushed into either category right now because that’s not my point. My point is that it has taken on the importance of a first-tier doctrine.
Cue Russell Moore’s future retort: “Nowhere did Beth say she waaaaaaasn’t a complementarian, only that she doesn’t believe we should elevate it to the same importance as the doctrine of the Trinity. We can all agree on that, can’t we?”
She did likewise with a tweet this morning, admonishing people for reading into her tweet rather than reading it.
With this new revelation, Moore will continue her trend of telling us what she really believes, now that she is free of the restrictive shackles of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baptist Faith and Message. What she’ll be saying publicly and unambiguously in the next two years is what she’s been saying coyly and piecemeal for the last ten.
