The Bible Nerd

It is always easier to discuss something in writing or discussion, than to actually work those things out in real life.  Doctrine and theology can be like that.  It is one thing for me to write all these posts on marriage, and quite another for my wife and I to figure out how that looks practically.  My wife is a beautiful, intelligent, and compassionate woman who I am blessed to call my beloved.  That doesn’t mean that we haven’t had our share of “discussions” over the years on marriage, and had to pray and process how to exemplify Christ in our marriage (or at least how not to kill each other…)

In discussing the “source” and “authority” views, it may be helpful to you to know that the two main views on women in ministry and authority in marriage are called the complementarian view and the egalitarian view.  Complementarians are those who hold that women were created to “compliment” their husbands in the marriage going back to the Genesis passage describing Eve as Adam’s “helper”.  This isn’t a slave like role at all, but a beautiful picture to them of how God created the genders to work together to full potential as a couple and family.  Egalitarians believe in mutual submission in marriage, and see marriage as a mirror of the body of Christ in that there is complete equality through our identity in Christ and intended purposes.  Wonderful men and women in Christ are on both sides of this argument, and both have published well thought out defenses of their views.

Let us address the various ways to explain the guidelines of Paul concerning headship and submission.  1) Paul commands them in 5:21 to “submit to one another”, and he does this to establish that all relationships should be mutual submission.  Even if we say that the command toward mutual submission is the over-arching command, we would still be left with having to explain the command to “submit” and the definition of headship.  This view would need to be combined with one of the below in my opinion to be a comprehensive view.

2) Paul is merely addressing what each one struggles with (women with submitting and men with love) but both are applicable for husband and wife (both need to love and submit).  I will agree that there is truth in the studies showing that men often struggle to be loving and to express that love openly to their wives, while women struggle in the area of control and coming to agreement.  Of course, both husband and wife need to show love and respect to one another, and are not exempt.  This still doesn’t address the meaning of headship, nor does it do away with passages like 1 Peter 3:1 that include submission but not in the Ephesians 5 formula.

3) This was a temporal command (not timeless) based on the culture of their day and was intended to be phased out as they understood their identity in Christ (just like Paul never says “Don’t have slaves” in the New Testament).  There are definitely examples of temporal commands in the Bible.  The passage looked at for headship in 1 Corinthians 11 has one included in the command for women to cover their heads while praying or prophesying in church.  Only a minority of Christians believe that is timeless, while most hold it to be temporal due to issues in Greco Roman culture.  I agree that this can be a slipperly slope as a method of application, but we can’t dismiss it all together due to the fact that there are solid examples like slavery.  I believe that if you apply Paul’s commands in Philemon, you don’t have slavery (viewing the slave as his brother), so he lays the foundation for the eradication of slavery within the church.  The argument against this would be that it is linked with headship, and headship of Jesus to the church has not, and never will change.

4) Paul is establishing roles within marriage with the wife “submitting” to her husband’s authority.  We will address this more later, but some feel that the issue of submission and headship should only be applied within marriage no matter our conclusion.   This belief focuses on the fact that Paul is only addressing marriage and never meant for this to be applied to the discussion on women in ministry or women in leadership.  The context of the passages begs for the translation of the Greek into “husband/wife” and not the other option of “man/woman” in a more general sense.

As regards the question on women in leadership, the two main views on headship in marriage affect how they answer this question.  The complementarian view states that if there is authority of the husband in marriage, then that carries over into the decision on women in leadership in the church.  For example, if the husband has the role of authority at home in marriage, how could his wife be the pastor of his church?  How could she be his authority at church and he be her authority at home at the same time?  Due to this conundrum, complementarians do not support women pastors, and have differing views on women being in any place of authority.  Some feel that as long as a man is the “head” or top leader in the church, women can assume places of leadership under them (for example as a youth pastor, children’s minister, or even elder).  Others feel that any position which would give a woman authority over a man in church (like a music minister for example) would not be Biblical.

Those that hold the egalitarian view of headship in marriage, in general are supportive of women in church leadership positions.  There are no roles in the church which are reserved for male or female specifically, but men and women are equally capable of fulfilling any job.  They view Paul’s command in 1 Timothy about women not being in authority as only applicable to the church of Ephesus at the that time, in the same way the command about women not teaching was not his universal rule.

In the end, both husband and wife are challenged by the comparison of their relationship to Jesus and the church.  Can any of us say that we have attained the level of love and sacrifice that Jesus has?  I can honestly say that I have a LOOOOOOONG way to go before I can say that I love my wife in the SAME way that Jesus loves the church, much less saying that I even love my wife as much as I “love myself”.  In the end, both authority and relationships are completely different in Christ than they are out in the world.  If we could as husbands and wives focus on that example of Christ and His humility (Philippians 2:5-8), I believe a lot of these arguments would fade away.

If we only had 1 Timothy and not Paul’s letters or Acts, we would have a very different view of whether women should be teachers or not.  As you read 1 Timothy, Paul doesn’t mix his words or seem unclear when he talks about women not teaching or having authority.  I have heard some fancy explanations to try to take the force of the words away, but to be honest, they are pretty lame.  You have to stretch and contort so much to explain it away, that Ockham’s razor cuts you to pieces.  Luckily, Paul wrote quite a few other letters, and we know more about his life from Acts.

To answer the question on women teachers, we must begin by looking at these other passages first.  Did Paul have female coworkers in missions?  Absolutely. In Romans 16:1-2, Paul introduces the Romans to a woman named Phoebe, as she is likely the one who carried the letter from Paul to Rome.  Once there, Paul urges them to “welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints, and help her in whatever she may need from you, for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well”.  In verse 1, he calls her a “deaconess”, although a few male dominated translations try to just use the Greek definition of the title and call her merely a “servant”.  This sounds like more than just a dish washer or letter carrier, but a coworker of Paul’s who was active in ministry. A few verses down in 16:3, Paul greets “Prisca and Aquila” (known elsewhere as Priscilla) and says “all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks for them”.  In Acts 18:26, BOTH Priscilla and Aquila take Apollos aside and TEACH him more about Christianity.

We haven’t even exhausted the examples of Romans yet as in verse 7, Paul mentions “Adronicus and Junia” and then seems to imply they are both known as “apostles” (wording is unclear, but their ministry is not).  I think you get the point of where I am going, that Paul’s letters and Acts show women in ministry and teaching, even though this was unheard of in Judaism, and rare outside of goddess worship among the Gentiles.  True, many of the women he mentions are married, and some might argue they are doing ministry under the covering of their husbands, but that doesn’t explain Phoebe, Euodia and Syntyche (Philip. 4:2), or Nympha (Col. 4:15).  We have no listing of their husband’s names or whether they even had one.  Whatever we say about 1 Timothy, it must fit with all these other examples somehow.

The easiest way to bring these passage in line with Paul’s other writings is to say that Paul’s rule on women not teaching was only for this specific church that Timothy was working at (there may have been other churches he gave this rule to, but this is the only one we know about).  Why would Paul do that to this one church?  Timothy was over the church of Ephesus when Paul writes to him (1 Timothy 1:3).  The main divinity of the city was the goddess of fertility and love known as Artemis (a mother earth goddess).  Women were the primary ones working as priestesses in this temple, and their beliefs about religion and women were skewed because of this.  Women were seen as a way to connect to the gods through having sex with them or hearing them speak in tongues while in an ecstatic state.  Therefore, women were the source of revelation and knowledge from the goddess.  Recall also that women were not educated, and we begin to understand why Paul is barring them from teaching at this point.

He does start the process of moving them away from this by allowing them to “learn at home”, studying the Scriptures to erase these wrong concepts of their place in religion.  This background also explains why Paul bring up the story of the Fall.  Women and the mother earth goddess are NOT the sources of all wisdom and spiritual revelation.  Paul reminds them that the true story of the Fall began with Eve listening to the serpent and then attempting to persuade Adam to eat.  This is NOT absolving Adam of guilt, as Romans 5 uses Adam, not Eve, as the one to contrast with Jesus.  BOTH are guilty, but Paul had to correct the notion that women were the to “righteous” ones who gave out knowledge.  The ugly truth is that Eve craved knowledge for herself and ate of the fruit, as did Adam. (a Gnostic writing has been discovered dating to the 2nd century in which Eve is described as the hero who gave Adam knowledge and freed him from the ignorance of the creator God)

In verse 15, when Paul says that women are “saved through childbirth”, we again interpret the difficult passage with other clear ones.  Paul maintains that we are all saved by FAITH alone (Galatians 3:26-29) and you don’t have to have faith and crank out a baby just because you are female.  Paul instead is continuing with the story of the Fall and God’s redemptive plan in Genesis 3:15, as the “offspring” of the woman will “crush the head of the serpent”.  In Galatians 3:16, Paul explains that the offspring is Jesus, and that means His death crushed the serpent (Satan, sin, and death).

Where does this leave us with the authority issue then?  Are there other passages where Paul allows a woman to have authority over a man?  what about women pastors?  I think we have had enough excitement for one post.  I also can’t really answer that question without answering the next Top Real Bible Question:  is there headship in marriage?  what is headship anyway???

You just have to love Paul sometimes.  In the middle of a letter to Timothy, he just lays down a seriously difficult passage to interpret.  It isn’t even the main point of that part of the letter.  He wants to give Timothy qualifications for church leaders, and so he begins to describe the type of man Timothy should be looking for.  As almost an aside, he says, “By the way, I don’t allow women to teach or have authority over men.” (Sean Ellis paraphrase version)  As if that weren’t enough fun, he throws in “Adam was not deceived but Eve was”.  What??!!  That’s right, for Top Real Bible Questions, we have two doozies:  should  women be allowed to teach in the church, followed up by headship in marriage.

I would rather talk about Israel, end times, or perhaps gnaw my hand off to escape a bear trap rather than address women’s issues on a public blog.  However, these are top issues, so to avoid them would only be preparing me to run for president of the United States (I can explain that later).  As always, I will try to present main views and at least expose you to key Scriptures used to support them.  Let me say this first though, that throughout church history, the treatment of women has been overall a seriously poor example of the life and teachings of Jesus.  Many of the advances and revolutionary ideas put forth by Jesus and carried out by the early church, were reversed by church leaders (aka men) over the following centuries.  Only in modern times have we seen the reversal of this in western culture, and hopefully a global trend toward equal rights and treatment for all women.  In other words, I know I am not speaking into a vacuum, but there is much emotion attached to these issues.

What we must be careful of is not swinging to far to the other side of the issue because of this pathetic past.  It isn’t that I am looking for “balance” in women’s issues, but rather for Biblical truth.  There such a thing as radical feminism, that shouldn’t be a shock to you, and it isn’t always Biblically based.  In trying to correct the doctrine of the church, some denominations have overshot the Biblical foundations all the way to stating that there are absolutely no difference in the way God has made man and woman (physiology excluded obviously!).

We will start by looking at 1 Timothy 2:8-15, where Paul begins by encouraging men to pray and for women to be modest and focused on good works instead of good looks.  So far, we are with Paul.  Then, Paul says in verse 11, “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.”  All the men said, “Amen”, until their wives or girlfriends slapped them in the head, and then they said, “Uh, hey Paul, what do you mean by that?”  To us in modern times, we debate on the “how” women are to learn, “quietly with all submissiveness” and miss the cultural context.  In New Testament times, most women weren’t educated.  Men saw that as a waste of time and effort.  Women were to produce children, care for children, or worse were seen as merely possessions to show off or have sex with.  This was not just the view in Gentile culture, but in Jewish culture as well.

A famous Rabbinical quote of this time is a prayer that Jewish men would say each morning.  “Thank you God that I am not a dog, a Gentile, or a woman.”  As to educating woman in the Torah, another Rabbi stated, “Better that the law be burned than to be taught to a woman.”  Romans and Greeks weren’t any different in their mindset.  Socrates stated that women were halfway between men and animals.   Lucius Valerius said, “Why should men grudge women their ornaments and dress? Women cannot hold positions of office or priesthood, or gain triumphs; they have no public occupations. What can they do but devote their time to adornment and dress?”  From this understanding, Paul’s view was radical, and the part of his sentence they would have been stuck on was “Let a woman learn”, not the “how” part.  Paul is bringing the revolution of the Gospel into their views on educating women AT ALL.

This is a classic example of the power of historical background in understanding Scripture.  What could be seen as offensive by women in modern times, was seen as a huge blessing and revolution to women in Paul’s day.  By adding “quietly in submission”, I believe Paul was encouraging women not to “go crazy” with their new freedoms, but to use them within their marital relationship as set forth in other passages (which we will look at in the headship posts).  You can imagine that with increased freedom, Christian women could be tempted to go in the direction that we saw in the 1970’s radical feminism, which part of eventually brought harm into marriage and the family structure.

In our next post, we will get into the meat of the passage and deal with Paul’s statement on teaching, authority, and his interesting take on the Fall.  Our first Biblical principle is now clear, women have the right and should be educated in Christianity, immediately creating a contrast with Islam and other religions.  Maybe I should stop here where I am relatively safe?  Nah.