Women and Church Leadership LESSON 13 of 13

Transcript - ML508 Women and Church Leadership© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 13 of 13ML508

A Retrospective on the Course, Women and Church Leadership

Women and Church Leadership

Introduction

We began in lecture-segment 1 with quotes from Thomas Kuhn and Anne Firor Scott. From Kuhn, we learned that

The proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. Practicing in different worlds, two groups see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. That is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But they see different things and see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that can-not even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may seem intuitively obvious to another.

From historian Scott, we learned that It is a truism, yet one easy to forget, that people see most easily things they are prepared to see and overlook those they do not expect to encounter. . . . Because our minds are clouded, we do not see things that are before our eyes. What clouds our minds is, of course, the culture that at any time teaches us what to see and what not to see.

Blog: As you again read those two quotes, what relevance to you see in Kuhn’s and Scott’s observations for women and church leadership?

What is true for the historian is also true for the biblical exegete. It’s striking to notice how our position affects, even determines, what we are able to see in the biblical texts. As you have worked with the biblical texts themselves in this course (and with vari-ous biblical scholars’ interpretations of those texts), what have you observed?

The differences among biblical interpreters on the key texts about women and the church are so great that at times it seems impossible to arrive at any kind of consensus. One crucial area of disagreement is on the foundational issue of hermeneutics,

Dr. Alice MatthewsAcademic Dean- Christian

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Transcript - ML508 Women and Church Leadership © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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the principles of interpretation. Another area is theology, which when we probe significant issues often turns up presuppositions that affect our exegesis and the resulting positions that people take on women and church leadership. We may find that a par-ticular interpretation goes far beyond the text itself, or if the text proves anything at all, it proves too much.

In recent decades, a number of theologians have picked up on this danger. For example, Grant Osborne was concerned about serious instances of the neglect of sound interpretive principles in the treatment of some key texts about women. He urged that we recognize the distinction between what is truly an expres-sion of principle and what is merely cultural in the biblical text (Grant Osborne, “Hermeneutics and Women in the Church,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, issue 20, 1977).

A year later, Robert Johnston took up the matter of culture in an article, “The Role of Women in the Church and Home: An Evan-gelical Test Case in Hermeneutics” (published in Scripture, Tra-dition and Interpretation, edited by W. Ward Gasque and William Sanford Lasor. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978). In it he provided a series of hermeneutical principles that should prevent the twisting of Scripture in order to extract support for one’s posi-tion.

The issue here is whether the role of women in the church is a purely theological matter (like faith or justification), or whether the way women appeared in the ancient world and what they did in public had a social significance that such doctrines as justi-fication or faith did not have. There is a qualitative distinction between the doctrines of justification or faith and the social role of women in biblical times. Archaeologists and other biblical scholars have gathered much information from art, inscriptions, the remains of synagogues, etc. These provide insights into social strata, methods of itinerant preachers, roles of women in non-Christian religions, family structures, concepts of authority, and other matters pertaining to men and women in the church.

As a result, many orthodox or evangelical Christians insist that it is not a question of whether we use cultural and social con-siderations in the interpretation and application of Scripture on women, but how we do this most faithfully. How can we use the insights given to us by scholars of the Near East to sort out what is cultural and what is theologically binding?

When we use cultural factors in interpretation, we never assume that the biblical message is culturally relative, but rather that it



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is culturally relevant. It’s easy to confuse the two. Even a basic word study requires that we consider cultural factors in order to know what common understanding (based on common usage and inner context) the biblical writers could assume between themselves and their readers.

The word cultural can feel very threatening to us who hold the Scriptures in high regard, so we must try to determine from the context of a passage what circumstances evoked it. For example,

• What were the circumstances under which women were to wear head coverings (or bind up their hair) in Corinth?

• Under what circumstances did Paul refuse to allow women to teach at Ephesus?

• What did “teaching” involve at that time?• What was the connection between Paul’s prohibition of

women’s teaching and the problem of false teaching by others so prominent in 1 Timothy?

Such questions may or may not involve the study of the cultural background, but they certainly require some reconstruction of the circumstances behind Paul’s writing of a particular letter.

It’s not always easy to distinguish what really is connected with cultural factors. For example, in the 1960s in North America, hippy guys grew long hair and a lot of facial hair to make a statement. Their beards had social significance that Dwight L. Moody’s beard did not have at the end of the 19th century. A century ago, facial hair and long hair on men was common and accepted, but in the 1960s many churches made it a huge issue. Arguing from 1 Corinthians 11:14 , churchmen went to great lengths to prove that all that facial hair and long locks were evil and men with long hair were committing a sin.

Men with beards and long hair a century ago were approved, nor is this an issue in most churches today in the 21st century. But in the 1960s, it was a big issue, and books and articles appeared in the Christian press to prove how evil all that long hair was on a man. If you don’t know the cultural background of the 1960s, you’d have a hard job making sense of some of the things that were written at that time.

In our day, most Christians are comfortable in substituting a handshake for a “holy kiss,” even though the holy kiss was com-manded five different times. Many Christians today (rightly or wrongly) refrain from foot-washing as part of worship on the ba-sis that it was cultural, in spite of Jesus’ command to do it (John 13:3, 13-14). Some who take Paul’s teaching about women in 1



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Timothy 2:12 as a universal rule are quick to dismiss as cultural his command in 1 Timothy 2:8 about men raising holy hands in prayer. Or they think nothing about women braiding their hair, despite Paul’s command in 1 Timothy 2:10 against that. How do we determine which commands in 1 Timothy 2 are cultural and which are universal or permanent? Were any of these matters any less cultural than the first-century Greek writer Plutarch when he wrote that for a woman to speak in public was an inde-cent exposure of her mind?

Religious, social, political, and economic factors influence our use of the Bible. Behind those factors are also our own lives, our loves, our values, and our circles of friendship. Someone we respect may take a particular position on an issue and, out of respect for that friend, we refuse to consider any alternative ideas. Willard Swartley (in Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women) concludes:

The biblical interpreter should recognize the temporal and cul-tural distance that exists between the world of the Bible and the world of the believer today, especially when addressing social issues. Whether the topic be slavery, war, or the role of women, the meaning of the same word, command, or instruction may differ significantly, depending on the historical and cultural place and time in which it was and is spoken.

In the end, your study of this subject in this course this semes-ter has been a theological study. As you probably know, the word theology comes from the two Greek words Theos / logos, meaning the rational word or rational expression of who God is. Throughout this course, you have been trying to come to a ratio-nal word or a rational expression of God’s purpose for women in the church.

Doing theology means discovering, systematizing, and present-ing the truth of God on any given subject. As you’ve worked with most of the principal passages on women in the Bible, you’ve been doing biblical theology. Four principles govern how we do biblical theology:

1. First, we pay attention to the soil of history in which God’s revelation came. We look at the lives of the writers of the Bible, the circumstances that compelled them to write, and the historical situation of those who



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received the writings.

2. Second, we also look for a progressive sequence in this revelation as it unfolds in a series of events and stages. Biblical theology focuses on the progress of revelation.

3. Third, we find our source material in the Bible itself, not elsewhere. While in the first principle above, we explore the “soil of history” behind the Bible, the Scriptures must speak for themselves.

4. Last, we organize our findings into a systematic whole. This does not mean that we must use the categories of systematic theology.

When we do biblical theology, we reflect where we stand on inerrancy or biblical authority. Some people dismiss some of the biblical texts because they do not hold that Scripture is wholly authoritative. Others define inerrancy so narrowly that they end up with a defective hermeneutic. This course has been designed to reflect my strong confidence in the unique authority of the Bible even as the various lecture segments have reflected on his-torical, cultural, and linguistic factors we cannot ignore.

In some of your reading, you’ve possibly heard or read that it’s impossible to allow church leadership positions for women and still hold to biblical inerrancy. Or you may have heard that if you affirm church leadership positions for women, you are either exegetically incompetent or you are disobedient to Scripture. It’s interesting that on issues such as infant baptism vs. believer’s baptism, or premillennialism vs. amillennialism, or the Calvin-ist/Arminian debates, people are more graciously tolerant of differences than they are about women in church leadership.

But a high view of Scripture does not automatically guarantee good hermeneutics. An exegete may identify his or her opinion with the inspired Bible so that any deviation from that human opinion is considered to be a deviation from biblical authority. For example, in her book Women and the Word of God: A Re-sponse to Biblical Feminism, author Susan Foh used the term “biblical feminist” to describe anyone who would allow women any leadership roles in the church. Her comments include these statements:



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• Biblical feminists see irreconcilable contradictions in the Bible’s teaching on women.

• Biblical feminists do not believe that God has given us His word true and trustworthy, the unchanging standard for beliefs and practices.

• The biblical feminists criticize the Old Testament and question its authority.

• The biblical feminists have abandoned the biblical and historical position of the God-breathed inerrant Scriptures.

• A faulty conception of Scripture produces apostasy.

Statements like these about some theologians who allow for women in church leadership may be true, but there are many theologians with that position of whom these statements are not only untrue, but are a serious misrepresentation. Such language can lead readers to conclude that anyone who holds views other than Foh’s regarding women’s ministries has abandoned iner-rancy and has become apostate. That is a serious charge.

One of the central issues comes down to what the Bible teaches in Genesis 1–3 about creation and the fall of humanity. Core questions include whether woman was subordinate to man be-fore the fall as part of the created order, or whether that subor-dination is a consequence of the fall into sin. If the latter, then another core question is whether redemption through Jesus Christ removes any inferior position, restoring equality.

As your final blog in the course before you write your two pa-pers, split a clean screen in half vertically. On the left half, list as many of the various factors and arguments you can recall made throughout this course that are against women in church leader-ship. Then on the right half, list as many of the various factors and arguments that you can recall made through this course that support women in church leadership. This exercise will help you write your final major paper.

Your final assignment to complete this course is to go back through all of your blogs, gather up the pieces that have been significant for you, and write a paper laying out where you stand today on the question of women and church leadership. The spe-cific criteria for this paper are given in the course syllabus under “Assigned Papers.”

The second part of your final assignment is to research the stance on women and church leadership for the church or de-nomination in which you are now involved. Again, the particu-

Transcript - ML508 Women and Church Leadership© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

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A Retrospective on the Course, Women and Church LeadershipLesson 13 of 13

lars for this paper are given in the syllabus.

When the apostle John ended the writing of his gospel, he com-mented that “There are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). While this course has ranged over large parts of the Bible and has taken a quick run through 2,000 years of church history, in a sense it has barely scratched the surface of all that has been discovered and written on the subject of this course. Your LibraryThing annotated bibliography may help you in the future to read books I’ve only referred to and to explore in depth matters I have merely alluded to in the lecture-segments. Don’t let this course be the final word in your exploration of God’s will and purpose for women in the church.

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Women and Church Leadership LESSON 13 of 13