The Role of Women, Part II

This post is picking up my response to this article.

The next section of the author’s article raises the question of married women being ordained. Honestly, the argument he makes is muddled and confusing, so I will simply try to deal with the texts that he cites.

He begins with Ephesians 5, again quoting only a small portion of a greater argument. The over-arching theme of Ephesians is that the Gentile readers must stop living like the pagans and must begin to walk into a new and “more Jewish” kind of faith. The Gentiles, who were formerly considered as outsiders, we “brought near” and made insiders through Christ (ch. 2). Paul stands on their behalf to offer them acceptance into this new community of faith (ch. 3), but they must be diligent to preserve its unity (ch. 4). In their new lives, they must be sure to imitate God, to avoid their former ways and to practice submission in every respect. For Paul, this starts in the smallest unit, the family. In essence, Paul is demanding that this take place in every place in their lives, especially with those they spend the most time with. And Paul describes the family in the terms that all people of that culture would have been familiar with. But simply because Paul uses the normal family structure does not mean it is the only appropriate family structure. More than that, we ought to operate in our own family structures as they are in a way in which submission is lived out in every relationship. Too often this passage is quoted as a paradigm for familial normalcy, and neglected as instruction to submit to all people as a regular practice of Christian living.

The next example is from 1 Timothy 3. Again, one faces the difficulty of language and cultural understandings that were common to Paul, but are not authoritative simply on the basis of inference. The author of 1 Timothy describes a worthy leader as a “husband of one wife.” Rather than understanding that the elder ought to be someone faithful and responsible, the author of this article declares that it must necessarily be a man.

The problem with the article’s discussion of both of these passages is that it breezes by Paul’s actual instruction and dwells on the aspects of lesser importance. Rather than understanding the teaching to be driven at the heart of Christianity in a person’s humility and faithfulness, the gender is over-emphasized leaving the real meat of the letters undigested. The author takes the passages so literally that he actually misses the actual instruction!

The next section of the article covers the appropriate nature of women speaking in church gatherings. Here the article leaps clearly over the most obvious explanation, which it had discredited early on (for almost no good reason). In a society where women sat on a lower social rung of the social ladder and the unity of the church was to be diligently kept, of course women would not be allowed to instruct men. It would have defeated the purpose of maintaining unity. Men would have been offended and put off. What I wonder most is why the author of 1 Timothy, especially if it was Paul, needed to include this instruction. Timothy was very close to Paul, knowing his heart and his ministry. Shouldn’t Timothy have known the patriarchal structure that Paul always seemed to abide by? Or perhaps Paul’s message included in it some sort of teaching that seemed to make men and women equals, and thus the confusion about their role in the church emerged. It seems to me that the most obvious answer is that the author was dealing with a cultural issue that arose initially because of the equalizing power of the gospel.


In case you missed the first post, check it here:
The Role of Women, Part I