Theology Pathfinder

Tag: tradition

  • Why Have Women Traditionally Been Excluded from Ministry? And Other Objections to Women in Ministry Answered (Pt. 4)

    Why Have Women Traditionally Been Excluded from Ministry? And Other Objections to Women in Ministry Answered (Pt. 4)

    So far in this series on women in ministry we’ve talked about my journey with the subject and why I interpret 1 Timothy 2:11-15 as not forbidding female pastors. In the last post I addressed some potential objections to women in ministry from other biblical passages. Now we’ll consider some broader theological questions about men and women, as well as what is the biggest stumbling block for some:

    Why has the church traditionally barred women from the pastorate/clergy for so many centuries?

    Let’s start with that. Because while I absolutely believe that Scripture takes priority over tradition, we should not ignore the importance of tradition for testing our interpretations. If we’re going to throw out a large chunk of historical precedence, we ought to have good reason. And to do so, we need to ask: Why did the tradition rise to prominence, and is it really reflecting biblical truth?

    In this case, we’ve already seen that women held prominent leadership positions during the first century, when the New Testament was written. Junia was an apostle (Rom 16:7), Phoebe was a deaconess (Rom 16:1-2), and Paul considered Priscilla one of his coworkers (Rom 16:3; Acts 18:24-26). This means that any universal bans on women in ministry would have been postbiblical developments.

    So did the earliest churches in the post-apostolic era include female ministers?

    Turns out, many of them did! There is archaeological evidence for female deacons/ministers throughout the first several centuries of the church, as well as written evidence attesting to women in leadership positions.

    In a letter to Emperor Trajan (111 C.E.), the Roman governor Pliny mentions that he obtained information by torturing two Christian women “called by them ‘deaconesses’ (Latin: ministrae).” In the 300s C.E., we find in a Christian letter a curious reference to a woman called “Madame Teacher.” In the fifth century, a woman named Olympias was lauded as a deaconess and founder of a monastery.[1]

    Also in the fifth century, Theodoret of Cyrus makes this interesting comment on Romans 16:7, where the female apostle Junia is mentioned: “…[Paul] says that they are of note, not among the disciples, but the teachers; nor among ordinary teachers, but the Apostles.” In other words, it seems this ancient church father took Paul’s words to be affirming a very authoritative female teacher.

    However, although women often ministered in the earliest churches, there is a noticeable movement toward male-only leadership by the third and fourth centuries that became overwhelmingly dominant throughout the Middle Ages. Why the change?

    According to church historian William Witt, there is one key reason, which he lays out in this excellent article:

    “Historically, there is a single argument that was used in the church against the ordaining of women. Women could not be ordained to the ministry (whether understood as Catholic priesthood or Protestant pastorate) because of an inherent ontological defect. Because of a lack of intelligence, or a tendency to irrationality or emotional instability, a greater susceptibility to temptation, or an inherent incapacity to lead, women were held to be inferior to men, and, thus, were not eligible for ordination. Moreover, this argument was used to exclude women not only from clerical ministry, but from all positions of leadership over men, and largely to confine women to the domestic sphere.”

    Witt goes on to cite a number of comments from prominent church fathers and theologians (including Origen, Tertullian, Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, and several Reformers) that clearly exhibit their misogynistic assumptions. These men were deeply enmeshed in the prejudices of their times, so it’s hard to blame them too much.

    But it’s also hard to follow them on this.

    Because the major problem with their line of reasoning is that it is simply not true — women are not inherently intellectually inferior to men. Science doesn’t back it up, experience doesn’t back it up, and Scripture nowhere legitimates such a view (unless we take a wrong view of 1 Tim 2:13-15, as I’ve belabored already).

    So the major flaw with the “argument from tradition” against women in ministry is that the reasoning behind the tradition is flawed. It relies on incorrect assumptions about women that, while common in the ancient and medieval periods, is not exactly in keeping with the truths we see in Scripture and in nature — that women and men are equally created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), equally redeemed and united in Christ (Galatians 3:28), and equally capable of leading, teaching, and stewarding authority.

    But there were always outliers, in spite of the larger consensus on male priesthood that built up during the medieval period. It simply isn’t true to say that arguments in favor of female ministers only show up after the feminist movement of the modern era. As New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg points out,

    “Some of this history has, in fact, been suppressed during the last century by those who have wanted to pretend that it was only with the rise of modern, secular women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s that any churches have opened all leadership doors to both genders. . . . E.g., the facts that the Evangelical Free Church of America ordained women and Moody Bible Institute supported the ordination of women before the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1910s and 1920s.” — Craig L. Blomberg, A New Testament Theology (Baylor University Press, 2018), pg. 286.

    And as Witt concludes in his article,

    “It is all to the good that Catholics and Protestants have embraced the inherent ontological equality of men and women and no longer argue against women’s ordination based on an inherent inferiority, irrationality, or sinfulness of women. However, in so doing, they can no longer argue that they are simply adhering to the church’s historic stance against the ordination of women.”

    In other words, if you don’t think that women are inherently inferior to men, but you still want to exclude women from ministry, then your position technically isn’t the “traditional” one; rather, it’s a quite recent innovation!

    Let’s turn now from the “tradition” issue to some other theological arguments commonly brought up against women in church leadership.

    Broader Theological Arguments Briefly Considered

    #1: God is identified in male terms throughout Scripture, so shouldn’t his representatives be male?

    This potential objection seems incredibly beside the point, since Genesis 1:27 tells us that God created all humanity, male and female, in his image:

    “So God created humankind in his image,
    in the likeness of God he created him,
    male and female he created them.” (LEB)

    Thus, it would seem appropriate that both men and women be able to serve as God’s ministers. I only mention this objection preemptively, as I’ve never found it to be a good support for an all-male pastorate.

    #2: The Old Testament priesthood was restricted to males, so shouldn’t the pastorate be, too?

    Perhaps this question is a little less beside the point, but at the same time, there is considerable discontinuity between the levitical priesthood and the “priesthood of all believers” we see in the New Testament. For example, 1 Peter 2:9 and Revelation 1:6; 5:10; 20:6 refer to all Christians (whether male or female) as priests now.

    Plus, when one considers the importance of ritual purity for priesthood in the ancient Near East, you can see a very practical reason why women were barred from the Israelite priesthood: they would be ritually unclean (and therefore unable to officiate) due to menstruation for an entire week out of every month!

    Under the New Covenant that Christ initiated, such concerns for ritual purity were replaced by an emphasis on moral purity — a purity of the heart. And with that change there is no reason to restrict priesthood in the new temple of God (=the church community; see 1 Corinthians 3:16; Ephesians 2:21-22) — on the basis of gender.

    #3: So then why did Christ only appoint men to be his twelve apostles?

    Jesus certainly took a big step forward from his Jewish contemporaries when he allowed women to follow him and learn as his disciples. That much is largely undisputed. But when it came time for him to choose his primary successors — the twelve apostles — he chose all men. Why not include a woman or two, if he wanted to truly show equality? Doesn’t it mean he wouldn’t support female church leaders?

    Why Jesus chose twelve men is a good question to ask, but as an objection to female pastors it’s actually a flawed argument. Consider how I could turn it on its head by saying, “Well, the twelve apostles were also all Jewish men, so therefore we should never have any non-Jewish church pastors, right??” It’s a non-sequitur.

    This kind of argumentation can also be dismissed when you keep in mind that there is a very important historical reason why Jesus chose men to comprise the Twelve: they were to be a symbolic reenactment of the original twelve patriarchs of Israel, who founded the twelve tribes. By choosing twelve Jewish men in particular to be his inner circle, Jesus was symbolically showing that he was founding the new people of God — the new Zion, the restored Israel — around himself. This action was a powerful messianic claim in and of itself.

    In light of this, it should be clear that the choosing of twelve male apostles was a very unique situation in history — one that shouldn’t factor in to the discussion of whether we can have female pastors today.

    We’re almost done with the topic of women in ministry for now. In my next post I’ll offer a few parting thoughts regarding my change in perspective on the matter, as well as some recommendations for further research in case you’re still wanting to do some more digging.

    Let me know if you’ve found these posts helpful! Have I answered your pressing questions, or do you have others I haven’t covered? Let me know in the comments.

    See you down the path.

     

    [1] References are from Ruth A. Tucker & Walter Liefeld, Daughters of the Church: Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present (Zondervan: 2010), 91, 94, 120.

  • Women in Ministry, Pt. 3: Addressing Some Biblical Questions

    Women in Ministry, Pt. 3: Addressing Some Biblical Questions

    In my previous post I argued that 1 Timothy 2:11-15 (often viewed as the strongest biblical passage against female pastors) is not a universal, absolute prohibition against women having authority in the church. Rather, it was addressing a particular, local situation in Ephesus at the time it was written.

    But of course, having been brought up to assume that complementarianism was the only possible view, there were still a number of important theological questions I had to work through before I could go from saying, “1 Timothy 2 isn’t a universal prohibition,” to saying, “Women can be pastors, too.”

    My goal in these next two posts is to briefly address what I personally saw as the biggest objections to affirming women at all levels of ministry. In this one we’ll focus on problems arising from specific passages of Scripture; in the next we’ll move on to theological and historical questions.

    I’ll start by answering some common arguments against my proposed reading of 1 Timothy 2:11-15. Then we’ll look at some other key passages of Scripture that pertain to the issue, like 1 Corinthians 14, Ephesians 5, and others.

    Additional Questions About 1 Timothy and Women in Ministry

    Doesn’t Paul’s use of Adam and Eve in 1 Tim 2:13-15 constitute a timeless principle about how men and women were created in hierarchy?

    We touched on this last time, but it deserves a bit more attention. It’s commonly asserted that when Paul says “Adam was formed first, then Eve,” he is setting that up as a basis for a male-dominated hierarchy intended by God at creation. This relates to the ancient idea of “primogeniture,” which is basically the concept that the firstborn had more rights, authority, and inheritance than their younger siblings/peers. Adam was made first, therefore he had authority over Eve.

    But think about this: Even though Adam is given dominion over the animals in Genesis 2 and names them all to show his authority over them, he doesn’t give Eve a name until Genesis 3:20 — after they’ve sinned and God announces that now the man will “rule over” the woman (Gen 3:16). Prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve are entirely equal. She is taken from his side to be his “helper,” a term used elsewhere of military reinforcements and even of God himself (she is hardly man’s subordinate!). And at the very beginning, Genesis 1:27 stresses that “male and female” were both made equally in the image of God to co-rule over creation. It seems pretty apparent, then, that any idea of hierarchy between the sexes is foreign to the context of Genesis 1-2.

    Think about this, too: Throughout the book of Genesis, a common trend we see over and over is God’s choosing of the younger to inherit the covenant blessings instead of the firstborn (Isaac over Ishmael; Jacob over Esau; Judah and Joseph over their older brothers)! In other words, the concept of “primogeniture” is constantly turned on its head throughout the Old Testament, to highlight the fact that God’s ways are different than the ways of worldly society. All the more reason not to read it into Genesis 1-2 or 1 Timothy 2:13-15.

    If Paul is trying to counter the beliefs of the Artemis cult in Ephesus, why doesn’t he come out and say so explicitly?

    Perhaps a lot of confusion could have been avoided if Paul had simply mentioned Artemis outright. Then again, though, it’s precarious for us to cast judgment on what we today think an ancient author could or should have said. We’re talking about letters — and in the case of 1 Timothy, a very personal letter!

    We have only one side of a conversation that took place between two people who were already intimately acquainted with the pressing issues going on at the time of writing. It’s like we’re listening to just one half of a telephone conversation — of course there are going to be bits and pieces of the context that we have to piece together ourselves. This is how good interpretation works, with any ancient text — even Scripture.

    It would have been nice if Paul had spelled out in more detail the kind of false teaching he was arguing against in Colossians, too, for example. Or if the epistle of Hebrews mentioned who wrote it. Or if John told us exactly what the “sin that leads to death” was (1 John 5:16). It would save us a lot of guesswork. But as it is, we have to do the work of piecing together the context as best we can, using the text before us and the insights we can glean from archaeology and historiography.

    How was I supposed to understand 1 Timothy correctly if I didn’t have access to any of this cultural-background information?

    Don’t get me wrong — I believe anyone who is a believer in Christ and has the Holy Spirit guiding them can understand the basic truths of Scripture without having to be an expert in the ancient culture of Ephesus. At the same time, though, remember that it was me looking at how Scripture holds up women in leadership in other passages that made me reexamine whether I was understanding 1 Timothy 2 correctly.

    Not only does Scripture help us interpret Scripture, but part of how Christ builds his church up to maturity is by gifting certain Christians to be teachers, to learn how to interpret the Bible and study the ancient context so they can help other Christians understand it. You don’t have to be an expert, but you can and should avail yourself of resources that go more in-depth for you. That’s what us teachers are for, we who invest our lives in studying Scripture with a view to enriching the life of the church.

    Why does 1 Timothy 3 go on to say that overseers should be “the husband of one wife”? Doesn’t that rule out female overseers?

    It’s true that 1 Timothy 3:2 (CSB) says “An overseer, therefore, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach…” etc. But again, I see 1 Timothy as primarily addressing some serious cultural problems that were arising in the church at Ephesus at the time Paul was writing — problems like the Artemis cult, or false teachers arguing that marriage was forbidden (see 1 Tim 4:3).

    We’ve already seen how Paul’s words in 1 Tim 2 suggest that the women in Timothy’s church in particular were in no shape to be overseers just yet, since they first needed to be taught. Also, we should ask why Paul lists “husband of one wife” before other qualifications you’d think would be even more important — like being self-controlled and able to teach. Obviously there were some serious issues going on concerning marriage in Ephesus.

    Some interpreters even see in Paul’s statement here a suggestion that some of the men in Ephesus were beginning to practice polygamy. But most take Paul’s words to be a generic way of saying that overseers (pastors or elders today) should be faithful to the spouse they have (which is how I interpret it).

    Other Bible Passages Concerning the Roles of Men and Women

    Doesn’t Paul also command women to be silent in church in 1 Corinthians 14:33-36?

    Here’s the passage:

    “As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should be silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but are to submit themselves, as the law also says. 35 If they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home, since it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. 36 Or did the word of God originate from you, or did it come to you only?”

    This is another passage that, like 1 Tim 2:11-15, seems pretty straightforward (and pretty harsh!) at first glance. But believe it or not, this is a passage where even more interpreters are convinced Paul was addressing a cultural issue limited to his time period!

    That’s because shortly before this, in 1 Corinthians 11:1-16, Paul gives instructions about how women are to pray and prophesy in the church. His instructions in chapter 14, therefore, have to do with something besides the ordinary exercise of ministry. I should point out that the Greek word for “woman” is also the word used for “wife” (gyne), and the mention of asking “their own husbands” in verse 35 points to seeing only the married women in Paul’s congregations being addressed here.

    The focus, then, is on wives not disrupting the service to ask their husbands questions (or perhaps to challenge their husbands when they prophesy, bringing dishonor on them in public). The fact that women of the time were typically less educated is probably at play again here. Paul’s overarching, universal point is that church services are to be orderly and not clamorous. He was correcting a specific problem that was common at the time, rather than stifling all female speakers forever (otherwise, how could he commend female church leaders like Phoebe, Priscilla, and Junia elsewhere in his writings?).

    What about the passages that command for wives to be submissive to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22-24; Colossians 3:18; 1 Peter 3:1-7)?

    This concept doesn’t necessarily rule out women from serving as pastors, since a woman can be a pastor and still be submissive to her husband. As an analogy, consider that a male pastor could have governing officials in his congregation. The pastor gets to preach the word of God authoritatively to them and shepherd them, but he must still submit to their governing authority in a societal sense. I would imagine a female pastor’s relationship to her husband could function quite well just the same.[1]

    But consider, too, that while Paul does command “submission” in the home, he qualifies it (in Ephesians 5, at least) in a context of “mutual submission” (Eph 5:21). All the commands after verse 21 are grammatically connected to the initial commands to “be filled with the Spirit” (5:18) and to submit to fellow believers. The wives are to respect their husbands as part of their obedience to Christ (“as to the Lord,” v. 22), and the husbands are to “submit” (in a sense) to their wives by loving them sacrificially and nurturing them as they would their own body (5:25-33). This is a remarkably egalitarian family model for the time Paul was writing.

    Even in Colossians 3:18-19 and 1 Peter 3:1-7, where the language of mutual submission is absent, the fact that Paul and Peter give commands to husbands to love their wives was counter-cultural for the time. There is more that could be said on this, but again, the role of husbands and wives in the home doesn’t really have the kind of direct bearing on the topic of women in ministry that some complementarians claim it does.

    For my more egalitarian brothers and sisters in Christ, these may be questions you’ve already considered. But for me, coming from the church background that I did, reading these kinds of verses stirred up so much confusion when I first began this journey. Thankfully, I now see far more continuity with the whole of scripture.

    I’ve landed in quite a different spot than where I began, and hopefully these posts help you to understand why.

    But we’re not done yet! After all, if Scripture doesn’t forbid women ministers, then why is it that women have traditionally been excluded from the pastorate/clergy for the majority of church history?

    We’ll look at that next time!

    See you down the path.

     

    [1] I didn’t come up with this analogy myself, but I was unable to track down where I first came across it.