First Women to Lead Evangelical Academic Societies Make History Together
An interview with Karen Jobes and Lynn Cohick
Theological academia has long been a man’s world, but in November 2024, conservative evangelical scholars witnessed women leading two societies’ annual board meetings and speaking to the gathered attendees.1 The historic occasion gave women and those who support them in the Christian academy the ability to “see what they could be.”2
The first female president of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), Dr. Karen Jobes, the Gerald F Hawthorne Professor Emerita of New Testament and Exegesis at Wheaton College, has been retired for several years. But accepting the role of the 76th president of ETS, she said, “was one final way that I could serve the younger people in the academy, mostly women, but also the men who needed to see a woman could do this job.”
Dr. Lynn Cohick, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Houston Theological Seminary and tenth president of the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR), acknowledged the pressure she felt in accepting her historic appointment as IBR’s first female president: “I didn't go in thinking, ‘What will I accomplish?’ It was more like, ‘Don’t mess it up!’ Women in leadership are often judged by different, even contradictory, criteria, and I felt the burden of representing women as a whole in ways that a given man is not assumed to represent all men. So I did feel some concern that I might not meet expectations, which would not only be a personal disappointment but also hinder other women from stepping into the role after me.”
What impact can two women have when serving conservative theological societies by sitting in their presidents’ chairs?
A Long Road for Female Leaders
Jobes and Cohick embodied the gradual shift within conservative theological circles toward inviting and including women into academia.
Jobes’s appointment to lead ETS is the more dramatic scenario, given the more conservative bent of the academic society. Amid a long and sometimes hurtful debate on the appropriate position regarding women in leadership, it took the entire almost 75 years since its founding as a society focused on theological studies for ETS to appoint its first woman to the executive committee. And though many rejoiced to see Jobes giving the presidential address, an opposing contingent remains.
IBR, founded 52 years ago, in 1973, has, since its founding, focused on biblical studies. The organization welcomed Cohick as its tenth, and first female, president in 2018. She served two three-year terms before passing the baton at the 2024 November meeting.
The presence of these highly respected scholars walking the halls of the San Diego Convention Center, chairing board meetings, and representing their colleagues acted as a shot of caffeine for many, energizing and encouraging the women who sought to learn, study, and share their scholarship with fellow professors and students. It also encouraged men wanting to collaborate with women scholars.
How Far They Have Come
In a survey taken after the 2014 ETS meeting, the majority of female participants reported having negative experiences at the meeting. Some described the annual gathering as a “hostile environment,” while others related belittling comments or being ignored by male attendees, along with assumptions that these women were present in attendance with their scholar husbands rather than being scholars in their own right. Surrounded by men who made up the overwhelming percentage of attendees, some women attended only once, choosing to invest their time and energy in other theological societies where women were more welcome. Others persevered, continuing to attend annually.
Much has improved now as compared to 2014, though the struggle has not disappeared completely. Accustomed to their longtime sole proprietorship over the academy, some men still question the inclusion of women into the theological academy. One female attendee of the 2024 meeting shared, “I was talking to a man at an event with people in my field, and when I mentioned my husband was also at ETS but in a different field, I was told it was so sweet I came with my husband. And literally everything else I said to him after that, he responded with some version of that line.” But pointing to her fellow female scholars, she added, “I had a stronger sense of knowing I wasn’t alone in that experience and that I do actually belong at ETS in my own right.” The relationships that female scholars have built through the year, often online, proved helpful during the November meeting. One first-year attendee credited the other women as being essential to ensuring the quality of her experience was positive overall.
It also helps that more men are welcoming women as fellow scholars. One female master’s student felt respected when she met a (male) professor in her field of study: “I approached a well-known scholar and asked to meet with him to hear about his current project, and he responded with ‘I’d love to, but only if I get to learn about your current project too.’”
ETS: A Historic Nomination and Presidency
Jobes has become a voice of wisdom and a figure to admire for younger academics. She and Cohick understand the obstacles female scholars face in their academic journeys. Their concurrent presidencies provided a strong visual example of competent, qualified female leadership and marked an important moment for theological scholars.
When asked how the ETS Executive Committee even came to nominate Jobes, she responded, “I really don’t know. I have been a member of ETS since 1989. Early in those years I would go to the annual meeting, but it was not a very comfortable place for me at that time, as there were very few women. I started going to IBR and SBL [Society for Biblical Literature], where I felt much more comfortable and welcomed. But I maintained my ETS membership and frequently would attend the last day of ETS when I was coming into town for IBR.
“I got an e-mail out of the blue,” Jobes continued, “that the nominating committee, when Craig Keener was president of ETS, was inviting me to allow my name to stand for nomination to the executive committee (EC). To this day I don't know exactly how that came about, but it was a goal that the board wanted to achieve, and they thought that was the right time to do it.
“For whatever reason,” she continued, “they felt I was the right person to do it at that time. I turned it down a couple of times, but they kept coming back. Finally, as I prayed about it, I decided I needed to do it for the younger women, particularly my students’ age, who were coming up. My career was basically over—I didn't need it for my résumé, my professional development, or my self-fulfillment. But I did feel that it was one final way that I could serve the younger people in the academy, mostly women, but also the men who needed to see a woman could do this job.”
Collaboration
Though Jobes wondered how it all happened, former ETS president Craig Keener remembers. He refrained from disclosing certain details of the EC decision due to policy restrictions, but he spoke highly of Jobes: “Karen is a fine scholar who has done excellent work and maintained an evangelical stance….” The ETS nominating committee is comprised of three annually elected members plus two from the EC. Those five personnel unanimously approved Karen Jobes to join the EC for a seven-year stint, “which means complementarians definitely supported it,” Keener said. “I was the only publicly identified egalitarian on the EC. And Karen could not have been brought in without the support of friendly complementarians, since I got just one vote.”
Affirmation
Jobes recalled, “It was a complete surprise to me. I feel very honored and privileged to have served ETS.”
Cohick affirmed Jobes’s description of the kind of person ETS leadership seeks to nominate. “The committee looks to bring forward a scholar who has accomplished much in their career, that has a proven publishing record, has been influential in the field, and of course [is] very biblically sound.” Cohick went on to say that while Jobes might have expressed surprise, no one would have been surprised if her name had been “Thomas” or “John.” Why? “Because she had the credentials on paper that other presidents had.”
Jobes’s Presidential Address
Jobes chose “Jesus’s Succession Plan: Reflections on John 17:20–23” as the topic of her presidential address. And Cohick lavished praise on Jobes for her courage in doing so. The speech, she said, was “what I expect to happen at those presidential lectures where there's excellent scholarship but also an engagement with the moment where we are.”
Other audience members felt similarly. One doctoral student said of Jobes’s exposition of John 17, “I teared up during her banquet address as she called the church to reject the divisiveness of the world and embrace our unity in Christ …. It was so powerful that the ‘first woman’ has been a faithful, prolific evangelical Bible scholar whose work has profoundly contributed to both NT and LXX studies.”
Jobes is editing her speech into an article to appear sometime this year in JETS, the academic journal produced by ETS. The audio recording will be available later this year on wordmp3.com, as will all other ETS sessions.
IBR: Cohick’s Circuitous Route
Unlike Jobes, a retired professor Emerita, Lynn Cohick remains active in the academy, continuing to teach, write, and speak. Currently the director of Houston Theological Seminary, she previously taught and served in administration at Denver Seminary, Northern Seminary, and Wheaton College. But she earned her PhD in New Testament and Christian Origins from the University of Pennsylvania.
Cohick knew from the beginning she would pursue academic life: “I had always thought I'd like to teach,” she said. “It never occurred to me to be a pastor, and I was in an Evangelical Free church at the time that wouldn't have seen me that way anyway. Going to the University of Pennsylvania, I became very familiar with SBL. I was part of the Early Jewish Christian Relations session there, one of the earliest of that nature. I've been going to SBL maybe forty years.
She recalls, “The first time I went to IBR would have been 2001 or 2002 when I started at Wheaton College. There were about 200 attendees, but I remember walking into the room and looking around. I thought, ‘I don't see any women.’ And then I saw two. I was never the only woman in the room at SBL, whereas at IBR and certainly ETS you could easily find yourself as the only woman in the room. It can be disconcerting.”
Describing the discomfort of being colleagues with men who were bewildered by the idea of a female scholar, Cohick recalled that some men “were being polite to [someone whom] they thought was one of their colleagues’ wives. There was never a peer-to-peer encounter,” and sometimes interactions were “very dismissive.”
Cohick joined the IBR board as secretary in 2008, serving until 2013. She was elected president in 2018. Since then, the annual meeting has grown to over 800 attendees. Cohick feels one of IBR’s many strengths is that “we enjoy wonderful scholarship from a conservative standpoint, and we get to meet colleagues who are like-minded.”
Another bonus for Cohick in serving on the leadership team for IBR has been the growing influence of women helping shape the direction of the society. “When I first walked in,” she recalls, “men like Lee McDonald, whom I served with, worked hard to include women. Other women were on the board over the years, like Lissa Ray Beal, Jeannine Brown, Carol Kaminsky, Michelle Lee-Barnewell, Ruth Anne Reese, and others. We had women serving around the table alongside men like Craig Keener, Michael Holmes, Brent Strawn, Andy Johnson, of course Tremper Longman—they're all so supportive of women.”
Pleased with the growth of IBR in recent years, Cohick said, “COVID made a huge difference in our student growth because, of all the social groups in the world, who are comfortable online? Students and young people! Attendance at the women's breakfast has just soared, as has the minority breakfast and IBR Unscripted. That has really taken off. So, as president, it's not like I wanted to start something new, but there were a lot of things that could grow.”
Concerns for the Future
Both Cohick and Jobes are concerned about the future of their organizations, citing the rising costs of meeting in person annually. Cohick noted that IBR benefits from being an affiliate of SBL, because that connection allows them to take advantage of many practical and organizational issues such as meeting rooms and accommodations. ETS had over 3,000 participants in the 2024 meeting—a fraction of the overall membership. The comparatively small percentage attending stems from cost—many schools can no longer afford to pay their professors’ expenses, a trend which will skew the attendance (wealthier schools sending more) and therefore the leadership and direction of the society.
Hopes for the Future
Although the outgoing president of ETS, Jobes will remain on the ETS executive committee for two more years. “What work yet remains is chairing the nominating committee with the hope and prayer that, even though I'm the first and only female president of ETS, I will not be the last—and praying for a real openness to have people of color and more women.”
“My biggest hope,” Jobes continued, “is that ETS leadership remains welcoming of women and people of color and ethnic minorities that represent our membership and that represent the church. And, of course, I pray we all continue to be faithful to scriptural scholarship and that the work glorifies the Lord and is productive in the life of the church.”
Just Listen to Your Call
Jobes has a message for the young women coming up the academic ranks: “The Lord has a plan. If he's called you to biblical studies or theology or pastoral work or whatever, as you obey him one step at a time, he will lead you to the place he has for you. That can happen in very unexpected ways. Continue to follow the Lord in what he's calling you to do, be equipped through education, and trust in his providence.”
Cohick urged younger female scholars to cultivate the strength of community. “It’s incredibly important that you don't try and do it alone,” she said. Women can help each other, for instance, in making clear judgments of evaluations they will face. “Women need to be able to sort out what's a legitimate critique from which they can grow and what is just sexism in our culture that makes them want to shrink themselves down or be fearful.
She added, “I think we can get in our own way sometimes, and that's where we need each other to say, ‘Nope, you're not getting in your own way. Keep going.’ As Dr. Jobes said so eloquently, just listen to your call.”
Completing a trifecta, in 2024, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi served as president of SBL, the third convention to meet in late November. Since SBL includes a wider variety of academic disciplines and perspectives beyond evangelicalism, I do not include them in this article.
A phrase attributed to Marian Wright Edelman.
This is so awesome. I knew about Jobes serving in ETS, but hadn't realized that Cohick was prez of IBR for a while. That's fantastic. Thank you for writing this out and documenting it. I don't know that I've seen anyone gives this the longer treatment that you did. Thank you for that service.
Represent!