Southern Baptists made wives’ submission to husbands official doctrine in 1998

Evidence

In 1998, conservative Southern Baptists revised their Baptist Faith and Message, for the first time since 1963, to add a section calling men “to provide for, to protect, and to lead” their families, and wives to submit themselves “graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Paige Patterson’s wife Dorothy helped author the amendment, which was closely based, in many cases word for word, on the Danvers Statement. Like the Danvers Statement, this new position rooted the submission of women in the pre-Fall creation, not as a result of the Fall—overturning previous characterizations of submission issued in 1984. When moderates proposed a motion to replace “women’s submission” with “mutual submission,” it quickly went down in defeat, and the original proposal passed to a chorus of “amens” and thunderous applause. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 387

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the Danvers Statement lineage; the reader’s existing knowledge of complementarian theology and Documents/Treatise sources.
• DEFINE: Shows how ‘complementarianism’ became codified institutional doctrine, word-for-word from the Danvers Statement.