“Recently two orthodox, confessional, female, Christian authors have published books addressing male-female relations within the church. I have read neither of these books so I am not commenting on them. I have noticed, however, that in some of the responses to these two books there have been appeals to ontology. This is a philosophical category. Generally, ontology is the study of what is. It is the study of being, the nature of being, the features of being and so forth. To be sure, as the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes, the boundaries between ontology and other topics in philosophy, e.g., metaphysics (things that transcend the physical world) can become blurry but do they become so blurry that Christians ought to use the category of ontology to sort out the thorny question of male-female relations broadly and the role of women in the church specifically?”