‘Fierce and Faithful’ book shines light on women in the Bible

A new children’s book by an Old Testament scholar and a New Testament scholar tells the stories of 25 women in the Bible. Behind the book are the scholars’ own stories of grappling with the role of women.

The first printing of Fierce and Faithful: 25 Women of the Bible Who Dared to Trust God, already was sold out on launch day, Oct. 27, Nijay Gupta, co-author of the book announced on his Facebook account.

The book, aimed at middle-year readers ages 8 to 12, draws on the Old Testament scholarship of Carmen Imes, associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology and the New Testament expertise of Gupta, distinguished professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary.

Gupta spoke in September at Follow the Call, a conference for women in ministry hosted by Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. There, he explained the book that led to Fierce and Faithful—his book Tell Her Story—had been inspired by the well-known words of a certain preacher to Beth Moore: “Go home.”

How the book came to be

Gupta elaborated his response to John McArthur’s words via Zoom. When he heard about the incident, he said: “The very first thing I thought of was: ‘Junia can’t go home, because she’s in prison. Pheobe can’t go home because she’s got to deliver Paul’s most important letter to the Romans. … Deborah can’t go home, because she’s a prophet called to hold court for the people.”

Contemplating that cultural moment opened Gupta’s eyes to a “huge gap” between people’s perceptions about “biblical manhood and womanhood” and what “we actually see in the Bible,” he explained.

The ancient world certainly was patriarchal, he acknowledged, and “cared a lot about family,” yet women are portrayed in Scripture not only within the home, but also outside the home and sometimes in unexpected places.

Damaris, for instance, was a woman the Bible places in the Athenian philosophical stadium. “What was she doing there?” he asked. Women generally weren’t welcome at the Areopagus, he suggests in Tell Her Story (p. 95), yet in Acts 17:34 she is recorded among two named converts when Paul preached there.

From “the two words heard round the world: ‘Go home,” Gupta’s scholarship and writing grew more focused on closing this “Mandela-effect” type knowledge gap about women in the Bible, he said.

In a seminary class he taught not long after Tell Her Story came out, this knowledge gap was poignantly illustrated when a teaching assistant alerted Gupta to pause his lecture because students were crying.

When he asked what was wrong, the seminarians answered, “We’ve never heard the stories of these women before, and we’ve read the Bible for decades,” he said—noting some students who spoke up were in their 50s and 60s.

Gupta credits this experience in class—along with a time a mother at a book signing mentioned wishing for a book to read with her younger daughter the way she was reading Tell Her Story with her older daughter—as the impetus for writing the children’s book he strongly believed was needed. Even though, he said, “I’m not a children’s writer.”

When he reached out to his publisher, InterVarsity Press, they were game to give a children’s book a chance, but wanted to do the whole Bible, not just the New Testament. However, knowing how labor-intensive his first book was, Gupta didn’t want to undertake the second book on his own. He said he immediately thought of Imes to provide the Old Testament scholarship and reached out.

Imes, who contributed commentary for the Holman Christian Standard Bible Women’s Study Bible published earlier this year, was eager to participate in writing a book about women in the Bible parents could trust, because it was backed up by scholarship, she explained.

She wanted boys and girls today to have the opportunity to be introduced to these women, “the way I wish I would have been,” Imes said.

Moving from complementarian to egalitarian views

Gupta’s story

Gupta explained he grew up in the “default setting” of evangelicalism, where men are “up front” and leaders, while women are supportive and submissive to men.

“And, I didn’t really think anything of it,” he said, until at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, an evangelical school in Boston, Mass., where he began spending time around women who were training for ministry, including pastoral ministry, one of whom became his wife.

He noted he’d been taught women who wanted to be pastors or in leadership “don’t trust the Bible, they’re disobeying God, all of that,” but seminary exposed him to different ways of thinking about women and the Bible and “broadened his look at Scripture on this.”

During seminary, he served as teaching assistant to Catherine Kroeger, founding president of Christians for Biblical Equality, providing him the opportunity to study and work closely with her.

This association allowed him to clearly see “a firmly biblical position supporting women’s voices, women’s agency, women’s leadership, and seeing them as models of the faith in their own right.” He ended up changing his mind about biblical limitations on women, he explained.

Gupta said he likes to tell the story: “I wrote my first systematic theology paper on why women shouldn’t be pastors, and then I wrote my final systematic theology paper on why women must be pastors.”

Imes’ story

Imes also grew up in a context where women weren’t seen in the pulpit, even to give announcements or pray, though the church did have female musicians.

She remembers her grandfather speaking out in church meetings against women deacons and “being very proud of him” because he was “willing to hold to the Scriptures instead of capitulating to culture and feminism,” she recalled.

The Foursquare context her family moved into during her middle and high school years offered Imes a new perspective on women’s participation in church. There she saw women leading worship and prophesying. Yet, when she entered Bible college, the school was complementarian.

“I thought the Bible was clear that women shouldn’t teach the Bible, to men at least,” she recalled. She was surprised when one of her professors invited her to teach a Bible lab and questioned whether doing so would be biblically allowed. She said he “sat me down and walked me through the Scriptures,” demonstrating there was “more to it than that.”

He was complementarian, but the professor assured Imes “under his authority it would be OK,” she explained.

So, she began teaching her first college Bible course within this framework, starting every class with the disclaimer: “I’m a woman and this is a Bible class. Neither of those things is going to change over the course of the semester. So, if this violates your conscience, you should transfer out and take another class,” she said. Additionally, she would assure students her teaching was under the authority of the professor and her husband.

But over the years, she explained, “her husband’s and her eyes were gradually opened” to the idea women might be able to lead in church “without it being an absolute nightmare.”

On a different campus of Gordon-Conwell Seminary than Gupta attended, Imes said she met women in the Master of Divinity program who did not match “the stereotype of egalitarianism that lived in my head.”

Learning from seminary professors, she discovered, “there’s actually another way of looking at this,” though it would be quite a few years until teaching grew into preaching, as a calling of her own, she said.

Imes noted, the thought that she couldn’t pass along what she was learning on Sunday morning “just got weirder and weirder” as she continued biblical studies toward a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

“The line felt more and more arbitrary to me and to my husband,” and she felt “God stirring in me a calling to preach,” she said. When she has opportunities to preach, she takes them, Imes said, noting, “When I preach, I feel God’s pleasure.”

The authors’ journeys influenced the book

The illustrations in Fierce and Faithful, show one scene of each woman in action. Gupta said it was important to him for young readers to see the women doing what Scripture says they did.

Sidebars elaborate on ancient culture, maps help place the stories, and “Your Turn” questions offer parents and children an opportunity to think further about how Scripture lessons apply in the lives of Christians now, inviting kids to lean into the examples set by the women.

Gupta pointed out the book could have been written entirely by him or by Imes, but they hoped writing it together would be a model of “what we want”—men and women together reflecting the image of God and partnering side-by-side.