The promise of Christa L. McKirkland’s latest title, A Theology of Authority: Rethinking Leadership in the Church, is ambitious. Authority – along with related concepts such as ‘right’ and ‘power’ – is among colonial modern Christianity’s most significant vices, enabling myriad forms of epistemic and material violence. Consequently, authority has become one of modern Christian theology’s central motifs, implicitly or explicitly thematising many of the major theological interventions in the 20th century. General treatment of such a theme would need to be deft and probably quite long. Through a series of introductory disclosures, however, we learn that what McKirkland actually offers is something more modest. The book’s tone and style are slightly less technical than her first monograph on theological anthropology; its primary audience is evangelical Christians from the Free Church tradition – especially Baptists; its primary case study is male-over-female gender hierarchy in the theologies and practices of church leadership; and its author’s positionality is that of ‘a white, able-bodied woman who was born in the Southern United States, is in a heterosexual marriage…was raised Southern Baptist…educated theologically in the United States and United Kingdom’ (pp. 1-10) and is currently working as dean of faculty and lecturer in systematic theology at Carey Baptist College in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In twelve chapters across three parts, McKirkland responds to the conviction that ‘misunderstanding authority can compromise [the Christian’s] individual and corporate telos (goal) and, consequently,… God-intended and God-honoring flourishing’ (p. 13). The telos, McKirkland argues forward from her first monograph, is ‘relational intimacy with God as well as with one another’ (p. 13). The constructive nature of the proposal – which turns out to be something like a Free Church evangelical theology of interpersonal authority – masks McKirkland’s essentially critical perspective: evangelical Christian sexism is the result of bad theology; abuses and misuses are primarily the result of misunderstandings of authority and power.

In the three chapters of part 1, McKirkland draws on the method of analytic philosophy (primarily the work of Richard T. De George) to pursue clarity through precise definitions and distinctions: there are two types of authority, executive and nonexecutive; and each of these types also features two characteristic modes, imperative and performative, and epistemic and exemplary, respectively. The third chapter brings these definitions and distinctions into conversation with select biblical and systematic theological treatments of authority by Letty M. Russell, Bernard L. Ramm, and Walter L. Liefeld, to consider ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ forms of both executive and nonexecutive authority. The six chapters of part 2 are dedicated to an examination of the foregoing distinctions and definitions through the classical loci of systematic theology. McKirkland addresses the doctrine of God (chapter 4), Christology and pneumatology (chapter 5), the doctrine of scripture and questions of translation and interpretation (chapters 6 and 7), theological anthropology (chapter 8), and ecclesiology (chapter 9).

McKirkland turns to biblical-theological and ethnographic methods in part 3 to construct (in the words of this part’s opening chapter) ‘theological boundary walls’ for what she has called ‘post-pentecost interpersonal authority’. This chapter summarises McKirkland’s sixteen systematic theological theses on authority before examining biblical conceptions of leadership and arriving at perhaps the book’s central constructive definition: ‘leadership in the church [should be understood as the act of] using one’s Spirit-given power to help others discover their royal-priestly calling and Spirit-given power so that every sibling-saint might live into their specific vocation, to bring all things into unity under the lordship of Jesus’ (p. 207).

Students of biblical and systematic theology – particularly from broadly evangelical traditions – will find compelling and provocative theses in turns throughout McKirkland’s volume. Her framing of Jesus as nonexecutive authority, for example, will likely inspire some debate despite her careful Chalcedonian nuance (i.e., Jesus’s authority is executive according to his divine nature and nonexecutive according to his human nature). As a work of constructive evangelical theology, then, McKirkland’s volume succeeds.

But, perhaps this is also the locus of my own critical assessment of the volume. McKirkland’s proposal – that better understandings and theologies of authority and power will yield better practices of church leadership, specifically in terms of the disproportionately harmful effects on women in the church – rests on an essentially epistemological premise: how one acts depends on what one knows. Despite this foundational premise, McKirkland consistently treats the topic of epistemic authority in terms of assessing knowledge/expertise without also assessing the conditions of knowledge: that is, how does one know what one knows? How is such understanding constituted as knowledge? Where McKirkland attempts to consider questions of the conditions of knowledge, her analysis rarely moves beyond the interpersonal (i.e. paternalism and manipulation) to the structural (e.g. patriarchy and antiblackness as central to the Christian colonial modern episteme). Scholarship inside and outside the discursive tradition of systematic theology has long demonstrated how the colonial moment marked not only contact between the Christian ‘West’ and a world deemed ‘other’, but also how, in this contact, ‘western’ theories and categories of knowledge, and methods of knowing, came to constitute a normative center, and how Christianity was instrumental in these more or less violent processes of epistemic domination – or, authority (cf. Charles H. Long, Sylvia Wynter, Kwok Pui-lan, Willie James Jennings, Ashon Crawley, and others).

So when, in her introductory disclosures, McKirkland names the social locations from which she argues forward an implicit interrogation of gender hierarchies in church leadership, she attempts to participate in a longer tradition of critical theological analyses of the normative center from the position of the margin. But, by avoiding a broader structural analysis of authority/power informed by the history of modern western Christian colonialism, McKirkland inadvertently supports an epistemic environment which renders her gender a liability for her argument, and her construction works against the critique which initiated it in the first place. Perhaps this is an attempt at legibility to the relatively more conservative elements of her audience with whom McKirkland wishes to stay in conversation. But what is legibility, in such a case, if not an instrument of structural epistemic authority?